CHAPTER 3I Feel Your Pain
A macaque monkey whose brain is wired up for single- cell recording sits in
an Italian neuroscience lab on a summer day in the 1990s, much as she does
every day, when a graduate student researcher walks in with an ice cream
cone. Even though the monkey is sitting still (it is the graduate student
who is moving with the precision required to eat an ice cream cone), the
machine makes a noise to indicate neural activity in area F5 of the monkey’s
ventral premotor cortex. This is the brain area thought to be responsible
for bodily movements related to grasping and interacting with objects.
But when the machine makes its whir to indicate that cells have fired,
the monkey has no ice cream cone; she is merely observing the human
eating one. This turns out to be a very big moment not only in the Parma
lab but also in the emerging field of social neuroscience. The detection of
neural activity in this location in the brain, under these circumstances,
led to the identification of mirror neurons, or neurons that are thought
to fire both when an individual makes a motor action and when she sees
another performing the same action. Some researchers now claim that in
humans these special cells — which have reportedly also been identified in
brain regions associated with facial recognition and pain processing — allow
people to automatically grasp others’ perspectives. That is, they allow “mind
reading,” or understanding another’s intentions, and empathy, or feeling
what she feels.
The enthusiasm about mirror neurons, and their divisiveness, is difficult
to exaggerate. Scientific American describes a “mirror neuron revolution”
that is utterly transforming our understanding of human social interaction
(Lehrer 2008). The New York Times announced a decade ago that their
discovery is “shifting the understanding of culture, empathy, philosophy,