Welcome to Your Child's Brain by Sandra Aamodt

Author:Sandra Aamodt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Published: 2011-02-27T16:00:00+00:00

DID YOU KNOW? IMITATION IN THE BRAIN

Sam once stuck out his tongue, with the sides curled up, at his baby daughter, and she was able to mimic him perfectly on her first try. This was quite a surprise. Such a complex act of imitation meant that she was able to generate a strange new facial expression simply based on seeing the movement—a complex mapping of a visual stimulus to a co-ordinated set of corresponding tongue muscle movements. Of course, you might be less of a geek than Sam, and just like the sight of your baby sticking her tongue out.

How can this imitation happen? Across many brain regions, direct experience activates some of the same neurons as vicarious experience. In electrical recordings from the premotor cortex, a frontal brain region, there are neurons that are activated when a monkey makes a specific movement, such as grasping a piece of fruit to bring it to the mouth. Researchers found that particular neurons, which they called mirror neurons, fired both when the animal performed such a movement and when the animal saw the same movement performed by someone else. Mirror neurons for specific actions are also found in the brains of people undergoing exploratory neurosurgery.

Mirror neurons have received a fair bit of hype as the mystical causes of a variety of other capacities, such as empathetic abilities. Although much of this discussion is overblown, there is a more general principle regarding how other people’s emotions and actions are represented in many areas across the brain.

For example, emotion-related brain areas show mirrorlike properties. Both strong negative emotions and the sight of a face expressing the same emotion trigger activity in the insula, a cortical region that communicates with other emotion-processing regions such as the amygdala. The insula also receives information from the premotor cortex, suggesting that mirror neurons could convey the emotional content of body language. Information goes in both directions between these brain regions, so they could even teach one another about emotions and their physical expressions.

Mirror neurons are just one example of how single neurons can represent surprisingly abstract concepts. The inferior temporal cortex contains neurons that fire selectively in response to faces, body parts, other objects, the memory of recent objects, and even a person’s identity. Researchers recorded a single human neuron that responds both to an image of the actress Halle Berry and to the letters H - A - L - L - E - B - E - R - R - Y. Recognizing a celebrity may not have the same social importance as learning empathy for other people, but the abilities of the neurons are just as amazing.

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