The Science of a Copycat
As children, most of us have played the game Simon Says. Human see. Human do. When you see someone else perform an action, you copy it. Yet for many years, scientists have pondered over how human beings seem to be so adept at just that: copying others. Now, a new study from the Journal of Neuroscience speculates that humans have specialized brain cells, called mirror neurons, which help you to do what copycats do best.
Researchers at the Wellcome Trust Center for Neuroimaging in the University of London gathered a group of volunteers in order to look for signs of mirror neurons. Each volunteer was placed under an MRI while he/she either performed two different grips or watched someone else do the same task. The images revealed that neurons in the inferior frontal gyrus of the brain responded to both circumstances (Saey).
Other groups have attempted various techniques in order to discover mirror neurons in humans. It however seemed that the crucial requirement to activating these neurons is an action that involved objects or motions. When volunteers performed or imitated a rock, paper, scissors game with undirected motions, the mirror neurons were not activated (Saey).
Mirror neurons were first discovered in monkeys in 1966 after a number of experiments (Ramachandran). In the 1980s and 1990s, scientists recorded a single neuron in monkeys' brains when monkeys reached for pieces of food. The scientists also noticed that the neuron would activate when the monkeys watched someone else pick up the piece of food.
Most likely to be one of the most important findings in neuroscience if their existence is proven, mirror neurons may be able to explain imitation and language development. Yet even the recent results from the University of London are not guaranteed evidence. Skeptics state the lit-up areas in the brain may not represent the firing of the mirror neurons but the response of other neurons in the same area.
The future looks promising, yet "A lot more groundwork needs to be done before can talk about these theories of simulation, language, and so forth," says Dinstein, a neuroscientist at New York University. "Until researchers can watch single mirror neurons firing, as with monkeys that have electrodes implanted in their brains, there will still be questions about the existence of human mirror neurons."