Mirror Neurons Give Us Empathy And Humanity

How wishful thinking and little evidence can lead to controversial theories, like the one about mirror neurons.

In the 1990s, Italian neurophysiologist Giacomo Rizzolatti and his colleagues were researching brain activity in Macaque monkeys. What they found — by accident — is that certain neurons were activated when Rizzolatti’s colleague Leonardo Fogassi reached out to get some raisins for the monkeys. The same neurons were activated when the monkeys themselves reached out for raisins. Hence the name that was given to these types of neurons — mirror neurons.

There has been much controversy surrounding these mirror neurons from the beginning. In 2000, San Diego neuroscientist Vilayanur Ramachandran took the discussion to a whole new level when he predicted that mirror neurons would do for psychology what DNA did for biology — namely provide numerous explanations for previously totally mysterious behavior. Ramachandran carried things even further when he claimed in 2011 that mirror neurons underlie empathy, accelerated the evolution of the brain, and even prompted the great leap forward in human culture that happened around 60,000 years ago, when we started to use more tools and create more sophisticated art. Others, like neuroscience author Rita Carter, have introduced…