Image: Mirror neurons and empathy
Image: A friendly Syrian preparing to be photographed in a Damascus hotel, November 2008.
Neuroscientists in Italy in the 1990s were studying the brain of a monkey as it picked up a peanut and ate it. What astonished them was that the motor neurons in the monkey's brain that fired when it picked up and ate the peanut fired again when, later, it simply observed someone else perform the same action.
What understanding does this give of the connections between our brains and the brains of others (including those of the, so-called, "other")?
After introducing the experiment on the monkey in his book MINDSIGHT Change your brain and your life, Daniel Siegel, a professor of psychiatry, writes, "This mirror neuron system has since been identified in human beings and is now considered the root of empathy". (MINDSIGHT, page 59).
Later in the book, Siegel draws even bigger conclusions.
"Cultivating our capacity to sense energy and information flow helps us expand "the self" beyond the boundaries of our body and reveals the fundamental truth that we are indeed a part of an interconnected world. Our "living organism" is the extended community of living beings." (MINDSIGHT, page 259).
If this is a truth (and I certainly sense it is), it has to be a very welcome scientific one, particularly if we give ourselves opportunities to extend our natural capacity for empathy beyond the bubble we usually inhabit.
An interview with Daniel Siegel can be found on the following RN webpage. It was broadcast on RN on December 24, 2009.
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/summer/0910/features/20091221.htm
Reference: MINDSIGHT Change your brain and your life, Daniel l. Siegel, MD, Scribe Publications, 2009.
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MINDSIGHT Change your brain and your life, Daniel Siegel, MD, Scribe Publications, Melbourne, 2009.
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29.12.09 — susan.dirgham
Hi George, Thanks so much for your response. I don't pretend to know anything, but I am easily persuaded by theories that can help to promote the positive in people and the human condition etc, and that seem to help explain "life" as I experience it. But I get your point. A large part of accepted science is only theoretical a physicist explained to me recently, which leaves life open to more wonder and discovery, I suppose.
29.12.09 — george
It still remains to be proved that human beings have mirror neurons as there is still much scepticism about their existence in neuroscience. Should ones perspective on behaviourisms focus on actual reality, or hypothetical plasticity?