More about the brain (and by implication, about behavior):
On a hot summer day 15 years ago in Parma, Italy, a monkey sat in a
special laboratory chair waiting for researchers to return from lunch.
Thin wires had been implanted in the region of its brain involved in
planning and carrying out movements.Every time the monkey grasped and moved an object, some cells in
that brain region would fire, and a monitor would register a sound:
brrrrrip, brrrrrip, brrrrrip.A graduate student entered the lab with an ice cream cone in his
hand. The monkey stared at him. Then, something amazing happened: when
the student raised the cone to his lips, the monitor sounded –
brrrrrip, brrrrrip, brrrrrip – even though the monkey had not moved but
had simply observed the student grasping the cone and moving it to his
mouth.The researchers, led by Giacomo Rizzolatti, a neuroscientist at the
University of Parma, had earlier noticed the same strange phenomenon
with peanuts. The same brain cells fired when the monkey watched humans
or other monkeys bring peanuts to their mouths as when the monkey
itself brought a peanut to its mouth.Later, the scientists found cells that fired when the monkey broke
open a peanut or heard someone break a peanut. The same thing happened
with bananas, raisins and all kinds of other objects.“It took us several years to believe what we were seeing,” Dr.
Rizzolatti said in a recent interview. The monkey brain contains a
special class of cells, called mirror neurons, that fire when the
animal sees or hears an action and when the animal carries out the same
action on its own.But if the findings, published in 1996, surprised most scientists,
recent research has left them flabbergasted. Humans, it turns out, have
mirror neurons that are far smarter, more flexible and more highly
evolved than any of those found in monkeys, a fact that scientists say
reflects the evolution of humans’ sophisticated social abilities.
Link: Cells That Read Minds (Sandra Blakeslee, NY Times, Jan. 10, 20060
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