Mirror neurons

From Dar

What are mirror neurons?

link to video:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/video/3204/i01.html

See also : http://www.flatrock.org.nz/topics/science/what_is_autism.htm

Mirror neurons online

Most of the research concerns being in each other's physical presence, with mirror neurons being activated in a brain by the sight of an action performed by another being.

However, my thoughts are that it's very unlikely to be true that the mirror neurons are only ever activated by observing others in *physical proximity*. In fact the linked movie demonstrates this because it shows an example where people are watching sports. But they are not watching real peple close up, they are only watching flat images projected onto a TV screen. The real footballers may be hundreds of miles away, or even recorded the day before with the result kept secret. So it's almost certain to me that the mirror neurons are being triggered not by the retina of the eyeball directly, but by the ouput of another section of the brain which has already done some substantial pre-processing. That being the case, the same kind of understanding of what's going on involving other people comes out of reading a novel or listening to a radio drama, both of which can produce strong emotional empathy in the listener/reader without seeing any visual images whatsoever, apart from the ones which we generate in our imaginations ( "The pictures are better on the radio" ). From this point, it's hardly any leap at all to conceive of the possibility that the same will happen during the conversation, stories, and social dynamics which happen when real human beings are communicating with each other using the medium of the internet.