EMPATHY allows us to feel the emotions of others, to identify and understand their feelings and motives and see things from their perspective. How we generate empathy remains a subject of intense debate in cognitive science.
Some scientists now believe they may have finally discovered its root. We're all essentially mind readers, they say. The idea has been slow to gain acceptance, but evidence is mounting.
In 1996, three neuroscientists were probing the brain of a macaque monkey when they stumbled across a curious cluster of cells in the premotor cortex, an area of the brain responsible for planning movements.
The cells fired not only when the monkey performed an action, but also when it saw the same action performed by someone else. The cells responded the same way whether it reached out to grasp a peanut, or merely watched as another monkey or a human did.
Appropriately, the scientists named them "mirror neurons".
Later experiments confirmed the existence of mirror neurons in humans and revealed another surprise. In addition to mirroring actions, the cells reflected sensations and emotions.
"Mirror neurons suggest that we pretend to be in another person's mental shoes," says Marco lacoboni, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Medicine. "In fact, with mirror neurons we do not have to pretend, we practically are in another person's mind."
Mirror neurons may help cognitive scientists explain how children develop a theory of mind (ToM), which is a child's understanding that others have minds similar to their own.
Over the years, cognitive scientists have come up with a number of theories to explain how ToM develops. The "theory theory" and "simulation theory" are currently two of the most popular.
Theory theory says children collect evidence -- in the form of gestures and expressions -- and use their everyday understanding of people to develop theories that explain and predict the mental state of people they come in contact with.
Simulation theory states that we place ourselves in another person's "mental shoes", and use our own mind as a model for theirs.
But the two theories are not mutually exclusive. If the mirror neuron system is defective or damaged, and our ability to empathise is lost, the observe-and-guess method of theory theory may be the only option left. Some scientists suspect this is what happens in autistic people, whose mental disorder prevents them from understanding the intentions and motives of others.
The idea is that the mirror neuron systems of autistic individuals are somehow deficient, and that the resulting "mind-blindness" prevents them from simulating the experiences of others. For them, experience is more observed than lived, and the emotional undercurrents that govern so much of our behaviour are inaccessible. They guess the mental states of others through explicit theorising, but the end result is a list of actions, gestures and expressions void of motive, intent, or emotion.
One recent experiment by Hugo Theoret and colleagues at the University of Montreal showed that mirror neurons normally active during the observation of hand movements in non-autistic individuals are silent in those who have autism.
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