Mirror neurons online

You’ve probably heard of mirror neurons by now. But do you they they are applicable in an online environment? Or do you have to be in proximity or at least have a visual stimulus before they will fire up and engender empathy or other related feelings.

The discussion started up on the onlinefacilitation yahoogroup and I copied my contribution to a wiki page because it needs rephrasing sometime but there’s also a related discussion on the valuenetworks googlegroup which I nearly missed.

The problem with the kind of biological research necessary to learn more about this subject is that it would probably require somebody to sit at a computer chacking their egroups and engaging in distributed discourse whilst having electrodes strapped to the appropriate part of their brain. Could be a little distracting, but I suppose you’d get used to it after a few days.

Another possibility which is already well underway by all accounts, would be to collect qualitative data from participants of a purely text based community after a few ventures into a 3d graphical medium such as Secondlife. Do some of them report an improvement in rapport? What about those who don’t – are they getting it from text anyway?