Buyology - Martin Lindstrom [24]
On one particularly hot summer afternoon, Rizzolatti and his team observed the strangest thing of all when one of Dr. Rizzolatti’s grad students returned to the lab after lunch holding an ice cream cone, and noticed that the macaque was staring at him, almost longingly. And as the grad student raised the cone to his mouth and took a tentative lick, the electronic monitor hooked up to the macaque’s premotor region fired—bripp, bripp, bripp.
The monkey hadn’t done a thing. It hadn’t moved its arm or taken a lick of ice cream; it wasn’t even holding anything at all. But simply by observing the student bringing the ice cream cone to his mouth, the monkey’s brain had mentally imitated the very same gesture.
This amazing phenomenon was what Rizzolatti would eventually dub “mirror neurons” at work—neurons that fire when an action is being performed and when that same action is being observed. “It took us several years to believe what we were seeing,” he later said.
But the monkeys’ mirror neurons didn’t fire up at the sight of just any gesture either a grad student or another monkey made. Rizzolatti’s team was able to demonstrate that the macaques’ mirror neurons were responding to what are known as “targeted gestures”—meaning those activities that involve an object, such as picking up a nut, or bringing an ice cream cone to your mouth, as opposed to random movement, such as crossing the room or simply standing there with your arms crossed.
Do humans’ brains work in the same way? Do we, too, mimic how others interact with objects? Well, for obvious ethical reasons scientists can’t place an electrode into a working human brain. However, fMRI and EEG scans of the regions of the human brain thought to contain mirror neurons, the inferior frontal cortex and superior parietal lobule, point to yes, as these regions are activated both when someone is performing an action, as well as when the person observes another person performing an action. The evidence supporting the existence of mirror neurons in the human brain is so compelling, in fact, that one eminent professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of California has said, “What DNA is for biology, the Mirror Neuron is for psychology.”2
Have you ever wondered why, when you’re watching a baseball game and your favorite player strikes out in the top of the ninth inning, you cringe—or alternately, why, when your home team scores a goal or a touchdown, you pump your arm in the air? Or why, when you’re at the movies and the heroine starts weeping, tears well up in your own eyes? What about that rush of exhilaration you feel when Clint Eastwood or Vin Diesel dispatches a villain—or that alpha-male stride-in-your-step you still feel an hour after the movie ends? Or the feeling of grace and beauty that floods through you as you observe a ballet dancer or listen to a world-class pianist? Chalk it up to mirror neurons. Just like Rizzolatti’s monkeys, when we watch someone do something, whether it’s scoring a penalty kick or playing a perfect arpeggio on a Steinway grand piano, our brains react as if we were actually performing these activities ourselves. In short, it’s as though seeing and doing are one and the same.
Mirror neurons are also responsible for why we often unwittingly imitate other people’s behavior. This tendency is so innate it can even be observed in babies—just stick your tongue out at a baby, and the baby will very likely repeat the action. When other people whisper, we tend to lower our own voices. When we’re around an older person, we’re prone to walking more slowly. If we’re seated on an airplane next to someone with a pronounced accent, many of us unconsciously begin