Updates from Derren Brown and the Enigma Crew

“”When you’re smilin’, the whole world smiles with you,” sang Louis Armstrong. He could have been referring to what some consider one of the greatest recent discoveries of neuroscience: mirror neurons.

Discovered in macaques in the 1990s, these cells were spotted when researchers made recordings from microelectrodes placed in the animals’ brains as they performed various tasks. While many neurons fired when the animal performed an action, a subset also fired when the animals saw the researcher perform the same action, with different groups of mirror neurons for different actions.

Neuroscientists have speculated that in people, mirror neurons could represent the neural basis of empathy. They could also contribute to imitation and learning, and perhaps even language acquisition.

It has been hard to find out if people have mirror neurons, but MRI scans have shown that certain areas of the brain – dubbed mirror systems – “light up” when we perform and watch the same action. Numerous studies have shown that people with more activity in their mirror systems seem to be better at understanding other people’s emotions. Conversely, less activity in mirror systems has been linked to autism and also with psychopathy – different conditions that are both noted for low levels of empathy. Nina Bien’s team at Maastricht University in the Netherlands recently identified inhibition mechanisms that hint at how we can mentally imitate an action without actually performing it (Cerebral Cortex, vol 19, p 2338).

Nevertheless, some researchers question whether mirror systems can take sole responsibility for empathy. “Understanding someone else’s actions and empathy are huge cognitive achievements,” says Cecilia Heyes, a psychologist at the University of Oxford. “So to suggest that there’s one discrete neural system responsible for it doesn’t make sense.”

However, Marco Iacoboni, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, claims to have seen individual brain cells behaving like mirror neurons in people. He made his observations when someone with epilepsy was undergoing exploratory brain surgery to investigate the cause of their seizures. The results are due to be published this month in Current Biology.”

Read more at New Scientist