Mirror neurons
Linkage between science and humanities
- You see someone yawning and what do
you do? In the same second you are yawning too.
- You are watching a race and what do
you feel? Your own heart stars racing with excitement as the runners are almost
crossing the finish line.
- You see someone smiling or laughing
… it`s so contagious that you automatically start to smile or laugh.
- You see someone wrinkling up his
face in disgust after tasting a food…. Even you feel your own stomach recoiling
and don´t want to eat it.
- If someone cries in a movie which
is the probability that you will cry too? Very high, right?
Have
you ever wondered why this happens? Well, I`m her today to clarify you in this
topic.
This
ability to instinctively and immediately understand what other people are
experiencing is explained by specific brain cells called mirror neurons. These
have been found in the premotor cortex, the supplementary motor area, the primary
somatosensory cortex and the inferior parietal cortex. But they were first
studied and discovered in the early 1990s, when by putting electrodes in
different parts of the brains of macaque monkeys italian scientists found out that there were
some individual neurons that fired
both when the monkeys grabbed an object and also when the monkeys watched
another primate grab the same object.
As
so, what makes these cells so interesting is that they respond equally when we
perform an action and when we witness someone else perform the same action.
They collapse the distinction between seeing and doing.
Mirror neurons are related with empathic, social and imitations behavior.
When people communicate they have the tendency to imitate gestures and facial expressions and, in many cases, feel what others are feeling, living their emotions.
The mirror neuron system also appears to allow us to
decode (receive and interpret) facial expressions. Whether we are observing a
expression or making it ourselves, the same regions of our brain become
activated. And the better we are at interpreting facial expressions the easier
it is for us to socialize with others once we mainly communicate our emotions
through facil expressions.
The first persons to discover mirror neurons
referred to them has a possible explanation to how and why we read other
people`s minds and feel empathy for them because we understand others not by
thinking but by feeling.
References:
Rita Soares:
anaritam.s@hotmail.com | nº 8193
I`m
17 years old and a global marketing student at IPAM Porto, The Marketing
School.
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