I had been toying with the idea of this post for a while and today I discovered that the Sleepy Kid has beaten me to it. Described here are some details of an interesting discovery (almost ten years ago, but only recently in the news) in neuroscience with possible implications for ethics, morality and possibly the development of language. It appears that the area of the brain that is stimulated when we ourselves perform a particular action is also stimulated when we watch, hear or feel someone ELSE perform the same action.
"The researchers, led by Giacomo Rizzolatti, a neuroscientist at the University of Parma, had earlier noticed the same strange phenomenon with peanuts. The same brain cells fired when the monkey watched humans or other monkeys bring peanuts to their mouths as when the monkey itself brought a peanut to its mouth. Later, the scientists found cells that fired when the monkey broke open a peanut or heard someone break a peanut. The same thing happened with bananas, raisins and all kinds of other objects.
"It took us several years to believe what we were seeing," Dr. Rizzolatti said in a recent interview. The monkey brain contains a special class of cells, called mirror neurons, that fire when the animal sees or hears an action and when the animal carries out the same action on its own.
The human brain has multiple mirror neuron systems that specialize in carrying out and understanding not just the actions of others but their intentions, the social meaning of their behavior and their emotions.... "
Read more about this and its social and evolutionary implications here in another ( long !) article by V.S. Ramachandran
"Researchers at UCLA found that cells in the human anterior cingulate, which normally fire when you poke the patient with a needle ("pain neurons"), will also fire when the patient watches another patient being poked. The mirror neurons, it would seem, dissolve the barrier between self and others. I call them "empathy neurons" or "Dalai Llama neurons". (I wonder how the mirror neurons of a masochist or sadist would respond to another person being poked.) Dissolving the "self vs. other" barrier is the basis of many ethical systems, especially eastern philosophical and mystical traditions. This research implies that mirror neurons can be used to provide rational rather than religious grounds for ethics (although we must be careful not to commit the is/ought fallacy)."
Is this also why we yawn when others are yawning ? And did you know that contagious yawning may be a useful way of locating a potential mate - at least for some humans and penguins?
"Only now are researchers beginning to understand why we yawn, when we yawn and why we yawn back. Steven M. Platek, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at Drexel, studies the act of contagious yawning, something done only by people and other primates.
In his first study, published in 2004, the former jazz guitar major (he wasn't doing so well and switched to psychology), used a psychological test to rank people on their empathic feelings. He found that participants who didn't score high on compassion didn't yawn back... Now he's studying yawning in those with brain disorders, such as autism and schizophrenia, in which victims have difficulty connecting emotionally with others
One species of penguins yawns as part of mating. Although the act itself is automatic, it can be kind of sexy, the researchers say. Platek spoke to one person who would go to a bar and yawn; if the woman he was eyeing yawned back, he knew she was watching him and would go over to her and start chatting."
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