Mirror Neurons essays

Mirror Neurons essays The phrase, "Monkey See, Monkey Do!" takes on connotations of reality with the discovery (or at least, the conjecture) of mirror neurons. Mirror neurons were first identified in the frontal lobes (pre-motor cortex area or Broca's area) in monkeys. Broca's area is the center in the brain associated with the expressive and syntactic aspects of language in humans. Giaccamo Rizzollati and co-workers made the discovery of mirror neurons. Mirror neurons are identified as potentially important from an evolutionary standpoint. Scientists have identified them as the key to the evolution of our cognitive and language abilities. The problem as it exists is that the human (or primate) brain attained its size with all the attendant genetics more than 250,000 years ago. However, our ability to create language, music and establish evolved cultures have come after our brains were fully developed. This means that the above-mentioned abilities were present in the human brain, but were latent. This would go against Darwin's theory of evolution, which suggests that only expressed genes (and not latent ones) evolve. V. S. Ramachandran suggests that a specific facility was expressed in a specific direction by accident. Then mirror neurons took over and that particular facility was "nurtured," it evolved and developed, and became commonplace (Ramachandran, 2003). Mirror neurons were discovered when these neurons were shown to fire not only when monkeys performed a specific activity (grasping, tugging, pulling and holding) but also fired when the monkey, not performing that activity, watched another monkey performed it. The functioning of mirror neurons indicates that it could explain why the human cognitive ability works. The most important function of mirror neurons is therefore in the ...