Mirror neurons, Altruism, Neuroscience

New proof of 'mirror neurons': explains why we experience the grief and joy of others, and maybe why humans are altruistic.

Ramachandran goes further, explaining that mirror neurons help us understand the evolution of the self, the mysterious narrator that provides continuity in each of our life stories. The self, which Ramachandran calls the Holy Grail of neuroscience, may be an evolutionary innovation adopted not first to give each person a conscious foreman, but as a way to model others. In this theory, the self started as a kind of little program -- fed with data from the mirror system -- for understanding other people, a kind of algorithm for generating a mini-you in me. Once it evolved, this program swung around and began to apply its algorithmic investigations also to its host, the brain in which it resided. Self-consciousness was born.

"It was almost certainly a two-way street," Ramachandran adds, "with self-awareness and other-awareness enriching each other in an auto-catalytic cascade that culminated in the fully human sense of self. You say you are being 'self-conscious' when you really mean being conscious of someone else being conscious of you."

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Dennett agrees that it is rash to draw profound conclusions about the role of mirror neurons so soon. "Some mirror neuron enthusiasts are saying that these are some kind of magic bullet, a giant leap by evolution that made language and empathy possible. I think that is much too strong."

Ramachandran and Dennett, who are friends, disagree on this point. Ramachandran thinks that mirror neurons will indeed bring about a revolution in the way we see the brain and the way we see ourselves and our relationship to one another. "Mirror neurons will do for psychology what the discovery of DNA did for biology," he wrote several years ago.