What a complex post! I think this is a hugely important topic for parents, and I hope this first installment communicates that to you. I’m going to post the first hunk, and see whether I can eventually knead the rest of it into something loaf shaped.

How can I communicate to you that there’s been a huge new discovery – possibly the most important about the human brain in these recent decades of unparalleled discoveries – one that fundamentally advances our understanding of what it is to be human and how it is that we can be human?

Mirror Neurons – A Primer

The idea is deceptively simple; the trick is to see that the simple idea may come closer to the core of what makes us human than anything – even language. And the most astonishing thing is that we’ve just begun to be aware that this function exists – an enormously important class of brain circuitry of which we were completely unaware.

As you know, when we do or think anything, there must be a corresponding pattern of brain activation. With functional neuroimaging we’re able to watch those patterns in real time – portions of the brain “light up” as we act or think. If you lick an ice cream cone, there will be a unique expression of brain activity which corresponds to your actions.

Now imagine that you watch someone else lick an ice cream cone. Your brain lights up as if you were licking the ice cream cone. You don’t make the action. But your brain “goes through the motions.” Or imagine that you see a hand reach out to caress someone, and see the hand rudely repulsed. Your brain lights up as though it had just undergone that rejection. Your brain automatically shares the experiences of others. Shades of sci-fi: We’re talking mind melds.

We know we’re wired to attend to and respond to the behaviors, the examples, the models of others. But this is a big new step: we are also wired to reflect those experiences internally, to live some part of others’ experience inside our brains. We do it automatically. We do it out of awareness. We don’t merely respond cognitively ("He’s licking an ice cream cone.") Our bodies respond to the experiences of others – “we feel it in our gut.” We share the experience by doing in our brain an imitation of what we see being done, and of the emotions that accompany the action. Researchers have posited that mirror neurons may play an essential role in:

• Empathy – understanding others’ feelings; experiencing the social emotions that allow us to co-exist; understanding social meanings. (Mirror neurons may be what’s “broken” in autism.)
• Understanding someone’s intentions – internally predicting what they’re about to do
• Learning by imitation and modeling – likely language, probably all the learning that represents cultural transmission. Translate that: Everything you hope you or others will teach your child – or that you fear your child will learn.
• Our emotional response to violence, visual art, dance, TV sports, music, video games….
• The bond between mother and child (my wild-eyed extension of the finding that babies imitate from the first hour of life)
• The evolution of human culture and the transmission of culture across generations – or, if you prefer, the ability to escape the time scale of biological evolution, whether or not that turns out to have been a good idea.

Sound like something a parent should know about?

Discuss Mirror Neurons in the Coffee Shop

If You’d Like To Learn More

A New York Times article from January 10 of this year, by the excellent science writer, Sandra Blakeslee, “Cells That Read Minds,” provides an excellent introduction, and prompted me to get at this post. [Gotta add a caveat here: the article made the McDonnell Foundation’s “Bad Neuro-Journalism” hit list for its homuncular treatment of neurons. It’s a sort of distinction, like being lambasted on “The Daily Show."]

Perhaps the best overall introduction is PBS’s NOVA Science Now – Mirror Neurons. The location includes their original 14-minute broadcast segment, which means you can hear some of the researchers mentioned here, and watch some of the research involved. The best watching in this sequence is to watch yourself: Notice how you react to some of the scenes? Mirror neurons.

A short version, from another excellent science writer, Sharon Begley, writing for The Wall Street Journal, “How ‘mirror neurons’ help us to empathize” and referenced here from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.com site.

Here’s a much-noticed speculative essay by V. S. Ramachandran on the potential significance of mirror neurons. He calls the discovery of mirror neurons “the single most important ‘unreported’ (or at least, unpublicized) story of the decade. I predict that mirror neurons will do for psychology what DNA did for biology: they will provide a unifying framework and help explain a host of mental abilities that have hitherto remained mysterious and inaccessible to experiments.”

From the American Psychological Association’s Monitor on Psychology, here are three short articles on mirror neurons which review Ramachandran’s ideas and offer a variety of research references.

One of the intriguing speculations that has come from this work is that primary characteristics of autism may result from mirror neuron defects. This brief report from Scientific American notes that autistic children show reduced activation of mirror neuron areas when they look at photos of faces, and that, importantly, the degree of activation seems to correlate with the level of a child’s social ability. I’m captivated by a phrase in this abstract from an article. “Imitation, mirror neurons and autism,” which appeared in Neuroscience and Biobehavioural Review: “These neurons show activity in relation both to specific actions performed by self and matching actions performed by others, providing a potential bridge between minds” (my emphasis).

Discuss Mirror Neurons in the Coffee Shop