If a child falls down and hits his knee, the parents suffer with him and often even feel the pain. If we meet a person on the bus who smiles briefly at us, this makes us spontaneously smile back and can sometimes put us in a good mood for the whole day. The question now is: Why can we quite intuitively empathize or imagine what is going on in another fellow human being?
Mirror neurons are infectious
The explanation of these phenomena lies in the mirror neurons discovered by scientists. These are a widely ramified system of special nerve cells in our brains. These nerve cells are activated by the presence of other people and, in a manner of speaking, evoke the feelings or bodily states of the other person in us as a mirror image. Mirror neurons are thus the neurobiological basis for our intuitive knowledge and understanding of what other people are feeling. They report to us what people close to us are feeling and allow us to empathize with their joy or pain. That’s why laughter is so contagious, but conversely, so is a depressed mood.
Learning and knowledge
From a very early age, babies imitate their parents’ gestures and facial expressions. From blinking to grimacing, the face of the father and mother is like a mirror for the child’s behaviors. Researchers call this behavior, which is ingrained in each of us, resonance behavior. This is made possible by the mirror neurons that have now been discovered. However, such triggered resonance reactions have not only psychological but also biological effects, because all experiences we have in our environment are transformed by the brain into biological signals. These signals not only change the nerve cell circuitry of the brain, they change our body as a whole. What we experience, what happens to us from others, influences and changes us – mentally and also physically.
Practical application
Mirroring phenomena find practical application in the reception and transmission of knowledge, for example, in understanding children’s learning. But there are also examples in medicine. For example, stroke patients with paralysis of the extremities can quite obviously accelerate relearning of lost skills by observing arm or leg movements.
