From Susie Orbach’s book Bodies, which is a great text on the contemporary conception of the corporal…
“Robert Sylvester, Emeritus Professor of Education at the University of Oregon, asks us to reflect on a very ordinary action between a parent and an infant. The parent sticks out her or his tongue and the baby responds with the same gesture. We might laugh seeing this and think no more about it. But ‘how can an infant possibly master such a complex motor act immediately after observing it?’ It’s a good question. Projecting the tongue is an intricate task. While we respond delightedly to the infant’s action, if we do reflect on what it takes for a baby to reciprocate our sticking-out tongue, we recognise how many processes must be occurring in the baby’s mind to enable that spontaneous response. The baby has to see, then translate that seeing into an invitation to respond and then activate the muscles which control the tongue and the mouth to facilitate the tongue’s extension.
“If we were to look inside the brain, we would see a thin band of cells in the motor cortex which extends from ear to ear and is activated when movement occurs. In front of the motor cortex, closer to our forehead, we’d see action in the pre-motor cortex, the area that prepares for movement. A chance observation by Giacomo Rizzolatti and Vittorio Gallese in a laboratory in Parma, where they were studying monkeys just over a decade ago, led to the naming of a new class of neurons which are involved in this dual phenomenon of seeing and doing. Rizzolatti and Gallese were tracking the firing of brain cells as monkeys stretched their arms out to reach for peanuts. They were interested in what happened in the monkeys’ brains when this movement was made. They observed that every time the monkeys reached for a peanut, a specific group of cells in the frontal lobes fired. One day, a scientist from another lab came in to see Rizzolatti and Gallese and casually picked up one of the peanuts. Rizzolatti and Gallese were astonished to see that the same cells that were fired when the monkeys picked up a peanut fired when the monkeys saw the man picking one up. The act of seeing the scientist pick up a peanut induced the same neural behaviour in the monkeys, as if they were performing the action themselves. This extraordinary and unexpected result implied their brains mirrored the movements the monkeys saw whether or not they were making the movements themselves.
“Many experiments on –– including some involving humans observing other humans in action — this group of cells was named and designated as the mirror neuron system. When we watch another human being making a movement, whether it is sticking out a tongue, carrying packages, swerving, dancing, eating or clapping their hands, our neurons fire in the same way, as if we ourselves were making the movement. From the brain’s perspective, Rizzolatti and Gallese found, watching is pretty similar to doing. The brain has a built-in empathic and mimicking capacity. It translates what is seen through the eyes into the equivalent of doing and is structured to absorb and prepare itself for what we may not yet have mastered.”
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