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What do we human beings do all day long? We read the world, especially the people we encounter.
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For centuries, philosophers scratched their heads over human‘s ability to understand one another. Their befuddlement is reasonable: they had essentially no science to work with. For the past 150 years or so, psychologists, cognitive scientist, and neuroscientists have had some science to work with - and in the past 50 years, a lot of science - and for a long time they continued to scratch their heads. No one could begin to explain how it is that we know what others are doing, thinking, and feeling.
Now we can. We achieve our very subtle understanding of other people thanks to certain collections of special cells in the brain called the mirror neurons. These are the tiny miracles that get us through the day. They are the heart of how we navigate through our lives. They bind us with each other, mentally and emotionally.
Mirror neurons undoubtedly provide, for the first time in history, a plausible neurophysiological explanation for complex forms of social cognition and interaction. By helping us to recognize the actions of other people, mirror neurons also help us to recognize and understand the deepest motives behind those actions, the intentions of other individuals.
The empirical study of intention has always been considered almost impossible, because intentions were deemed too mental to be studied with empirical tools. How do we even know that other people have mental states similar to our own? Philosophers have mulled over this „problem of other minds“ for centuries, with very little progress. Now they have some real science to work with. Research on mirror neurons gives them - and everyone interested in how we understand one another - some remarkable food for thought.
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(mirror neurons) will force us to rethink radically the deepest aspects of our social relations and are very selves. Some years ago, V.S. Ramachandran suggested that the discovery of mirror neurons promised to do for neuroscience what the discovery of DNA did for biology.
V.S. Ramachandran (2000)
MIRROR NEURONS and imitation learning as the driving force behind "the great leap forward" in human evolution.
The discovery of mirror neurons in the frontal lobes of monkeys, and their potential relevance to human brain evolution - which I speculate on in this essay - is 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. http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/ramachandran/ramachandran_p1.html
Iacoboni
Cognitive Linguistics
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