Mirror Neurons Poem by gershon hepner

With his mirror neurons he observes
his mistress cheating on him and he feels,
by stimuli produced in his own nerves,
co-conspirator in love he steals.

Inspired by an article in the NYR, June 26,2008, “How the Mind Works: Revelations, ” by Isaac Rosenfield and Edward Ziff:

The importance of body image and motor activity for perception, physical movement, and thought is suggested by the recent discovery of 'mirror neurons' by Giacomo Rizzolatti and his colleagues. They observed that the neurons that fired when a monkey grasped an object also fired when the monkey watched a scientist grasp the same object. The monkey apparently understood the action of the experimenter because the activity within its brain was similar when the monkey was observing the experimenter and when the monkey was grasping the object. What was surprising was that the same neurons that produced 'motor actions, ' i.e., actions involving muscular movement, were active when the monkey was perceiving those actions performed by others. The 'rigid divide, ' Rizzolatti and Corrado Sinigaglia write in their new book, Mirrors in the Brain, between perceptive, motor, and cognitive processes is to a great extent artificial; not only does perception appear to be embedded in the dynamics of action, becoming much more composite than used to be thought in the past, but the acting brain is also and above all a brain that understands. We can recognize and understand the actions of others because of the mirror neurons; as Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia write, this understanding 'depends first of all on our motor neurons.'[5] Our abilities to understand and react to the emotions of others may depend on the brain's ability to imitate the neuronal activity of the individual being observed. When we see a friend crying, we may feel sympathy because the activity in our brain is similar to that in the brain of the person crying. We recognize disgust in another person through our own experience of the feeling of disgust and the associated neural activity. Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia write: “our perceptions of the motor acts and emotive reactions of others appear to be united by a mirror mechanism that permits our brain to immediately understand what we are seeing, feeling, or imagining others to be doing, as it triggers the same neural structures... that are responsible for our own actions and emotions.”

6/11/08