Proximity to one’s own kind and the ability to understand them are among the most important needs of all normal people, as well as representatives of any other species that need some form of cooperation to survive. These needs are so important that the ability to satisfy them has evolved long before the intelligence of our ancestors allowed them to seek cooperation consciously. Apparently, this ability is inherent in the very structure of the mammalian brain. One of the mechanisms of social integration (perhaps the most important of them) is associated with the system of mirror neurons. This is the name of the brain’s neurons, which are activated, firstly, when a person or animal performs an action, and secondly, when he (or she) observes how this action is performed by someone else. A similar property is noted in the neurons involved in the emergence of emotions and thinking: some of them are normally activated when a person experiences certain emotions or when he has certain thoughts, but also in cases when he notices the same emotions or thoughts in others. The mirror neuron effect and similar “mirror” properties of neurons associated with emotions and thoughts allow an observer to instantly and automatically get an idea of what the other person is currently feeling. For example, when we see a person lifting a heavy object, the mirror neurons that would fire in us when lifting weights (and create a sense of tension and heaviness) are fired and create a feeling in us (even if it is so weak that we ourselves are not aware of it), as if we are also lifting weights. As a result, we don’t even have to think about exactly what that person is feeling at the moment: we immediately know this from our own direct feelings. The ability to intuitively understand what another person is feeling or thinking seems to underlie both imitation and empathy. It is she who helps us learn different actions by simply observing the actions of others, and it is she who allows us, when seeing another person who is in pain, not only to find out that he is in pain, but also to feel his pain ourselves. This ability probably played an important role in the development of morality. Mirror neurons were discovered in 1995 by accident. A group of researchers from the University of Parma, led by Giacomo Rizzolatti, tried to find out exactly which neurons in the motor cortex of monkeys are activated when performing certain actions. One day, they implanted electrodes in the premotor cortex of a monkey to measure the activity of neurons accompanying the simple act of picking up a piece of food. During a short break, one of the experimenters, hungry, picked up one of the pieces and put it in his mouth in the same way as the monkey did. The monkey did nothing but stare. But suddenly, the device registered the activity of those cortical cells that were activated when the monkey itself took pieces of food. The researchers did not attribute this event to an equipment malfunction (which could well happen), but tried to perform various other actions in front of the monkey. And each time it turned out that the neurons that were fired when she did something herself were also fired when the experimenter did the same thing in front of her eyes.

Mirror neurons allow us to understand how other people feel when they perform any actions, as well as how they feel when someone or something touches their body. In one study, subjects’ brains were scanned by running a brush over their leg or showing a video recording of one person touching another’s leg. The picture shows the results of a brain scan, in which the area of overlap of areas excited by touching and observing touching another person is highlighted in white. The areas activated only by touching the right or left foot are highlighted in red, and the areas activated only by observing the touch are highlighted in blue. The experimental results indicate the presence of mirror neurons only in the left hemisphere, but other experiments have shown that such neurons are present in the right hemisphere. In another experiment, it turned out that mirror neurons can automatically give us an idea of another person’s intentions. The researchers showed the subjects images of a hand taking a cup in two different contexts. In the first oiv4ae, there was a plate of untouched cookies on the table, and in the second, it was clear that the tea party was over: there were crumbs on the plate. When the subjects looked at the images, they measured the activity of the frontal lobe cortex, the area responsible for understanding the meaning of actions (rather than simply imitating them). In the first and in the second case, different neurons were activated. This indicates that although the action itself (lifting the cup) was more or less the same, the brain understood it differently in these two cases. In the first case, the action (presumably) meant that a person takes a cup to drink from it, and in the second case, to take it to the sink. Source: Rita Carter “How the Brain Works”