The Public Becoming Private

In the early 1990s scientists in Parma, Italy, accidentally discovered that many of the same neurons in the brain of a macaque monkey fire when the monkey grasps something and when the monkey simply sees another monkey, or even a human, perform the same physical action. This has led to a blossoming of research on “mirror neurons,” which V.S. Ramachandran predicts “will do for psychology what DNA did for biology...”

Vittorio Gallese, one of the first neuroscientists investigating mirror neurons, speaks of embodied simulation: “When I see the facial expression of someone else, and this perception leads me to experience that expression as a particular affective state, I do not accomplish this type of understanding through an argument by analogy. The other’s emotion is constituted, experienced and therefore directly understood by means of an embodied simulation producing a shared body state. It is the activation of a neural mechanism shared by the observer and the observed to enable direct experiential understanding.”

Here’s an excellent NOVA video from PBS on mirror neurons and also a link to an article I included in an earlier post about waterboarding (Nov. 4, 2007).