you can hold in the palm of your hand but it can contemplate the vastness of interstellar space it can contemplate the meaning of infinity ask questions about the meaning of its own existence about the nature of god
other neurons in the brain and based on this people have calculated that the number of permutations and combinations of brain activity exceeds the number of elementary particles in the universe
so how do you go about studying the brain one approach is to look at patients who had lesions in different part of the brain and study changes in their behavior this is what i spoke about in the last
now one recent discovery that has been made by researchers in italy in parma by giacomo rizzolatti and his colleagues is a group of neurons called mirror neurons which are on the front of the brain in the frontal lobes
now it turns out there are neurons which are called ordinary motor command neurons in the front of the brain which have been known for over fifty years these neurons will fire when a person performs a specific action for example if i do that and reach and grab an apple
a motor command neuron in the front of my brain will fire if i reach out and pull an object another neuron will fire commanding me to pull that object
called motor command neurons that have been known for a long time but what rizzolatti found was a subset of these neurons maybe about twenty percent of them
also fire when i'm looking at somebody else performing the same action so here is a neuron that fires when i reach and grab something but it also fires when i watch joe reaching and grabbing something
and this is truly astonishing because it's as though this neuron is adopting the other person 's point of view it's almost as though it's performing a virtual reality simulation of the other person 's action
now what is the significance of these mirror neurons for one thing they must be involved in things like imitation and emulation because to imitate a complex act requires my brain to adopt the other person 's point of view
so this is important of imitation and emulation well why is that important well let 's take a look at the next slide so how do you do imitation why is imitation important mirror neurons and imitation emulation now
let 's look at culture the phenomenon of human culture if you go back in time about to one hundred thousand years ago let 's look at human evolution
it turns out that something very important happened around seventy five thousand years ago and that is there is a sudden emergence and rapid spread of a number of skills that are unique to human beings like tool use
use of fire the use of shelters and of course language and the ability to read somebody else's mind and interpret that person 's behavior all of that happened relatively quickly even though the human brain had achieved its present size almost three or four hundred thousand years ago
hundred thousand years ago all of this happened very very quickly and i claim that what happened was the sudden emergence of a sophisticated mirror neuron system which allowed you to emulate and imitate other people 's actions so
the population or was transmitted vertically down the generations so this made evolution suddenly lamarckian instead of darwinian
another polar bear and skin it and put the skin on its body fur on the body and learn it in one step what the polar bear took one hundred thousand years to learn
can learn in five minutes maybe ten minutes and then once it's learned this it spreads in geometric proportion across a population this is the basis the imitation of complex skills is what we call culture and is the basis of civilization
neuron in the somatosensory cortex in the sensory region of the brain fires but the same neuron in some cases will fire when i simply watch another person being touched
so it's empathizing the other person being touched so most of them will fire when i'm touched in different locations different neurons for different locations but a subset of them will fire even when i watch somebody else being touched in the same location
here again you have neurons which are enrolled in empathy now the question then arises if i simply watch another person being touched why do i not get confused and literally feel that touch sensation
merely by watching somebody being touched i mean i empathize with that person but i don't literally feel the touch well that's because you've got receptors in your skin touch and pain receptors going back into your brain and saying don 't worry you're not being touched
so empathize by all means with the other person but do not actually experience the touch otherwise you'll get confused and muddled okay so there is a feedback signal
that vetos the signal of the mirror neuron preventing you from consciously experiencing that touch but if you remove the arm you simply anesthetize my arm
in other words you have dissolved the barrier between you and other human beings so i call them gandhi neurons or empathy neurons
you experience that person 's touch in your mind you've dissolved the barrier between you and other human beings and this of course is the basis of much of eastern philosophy
and that is there is no real independent self aloof from other human beings inspecting the world inspecting other people you are in fact connected not just
our understanding of basic neuroscience so you have a patient with a phantom limb if the arm has been removed and you have a phantom and you watch somebody else being touched you feel it in your phantom
the astonishing thing is if you have pain in your phantom limb you squeeze the other person 's hand massage the other person 's hand that relieves the pain in your phantom hand
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