When parents conceive a child, their combined genetic information provides the developing embryo with the necessary bodybuilding directions—such as gender identity, nose placement, and skin color. After the child is born, parents and others must provide cultural information about how to live in our complex social environment. They provide this mentoring through language and our brain’s remarkable recently discovered mirror neuron system.

The renowned neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran suggested at the turn of the 21st century that the discovery of mirror neurons might provide the same powerful unifying framework for our understanding of teaching and learning that the 1953 discovery of DNA did for our understanding of genetics. Recent developments suggest that his prediction might be correct. (www.edge.org/3rd_culture/
ramachandran06/ramachandran06_index.html)

The initial discovery of mirror neurons 15 years ago was somewhat accidental. Giacomo Rizzolatti and his team of Italian neuroscientists were studying monkey brain systems that regulate intentional hand movements. They discovered that neurons in the premotor areas of the cortex that prime movement sequences (such as to grasp an object or to break open a peanut) activate milliseconds before the movement occurs, but also when the monkey simply observes someone else making that same movement sequence.

The premotor neurons didn’t activate at the mere observation of a hand or mouth—only when it was carrying out a goal directed action. Further, they responded to a hand but not to a tool that was grasping or moving an object (since brain motor areas regulate body parts and not tools).

This discovery was very significant because it located the frontal lobe system that creates a mental model of the intentional movements of others, and then primes the responsive imitative behavior.

The principal reason that animals have a brain is to plan, regulate, and predict movements. Plants are at least as successful as animals, but they don’t have or need a brain. Since they’re not going anywhere of their own volition, they don’t even need to know where they are. What’s the point?

But if legs, fins, or wings make an organism mobile, it needs a sensory system to let it know about here and there, a decision system to determine if here is better than there or if there is better than here, and a motor system to get it to there if that’s the better survival option.

These regulatory systems must begin to develop almost immediately, and most movement skills can’t be learned solely through verbal directions (try to use words alone to teach a child how to ride a bicycle).

A cognitive system that allows a brain to simulate and then to imitate the observed movement sequences of others would thus be an ideal animal learning system—and that’s what mirror neurons do.