Mirror Neuron System
Research has been conducted to locate where in the brain specific parts and neurological systems are activated when humans imitate behaviors and actions of others, discovering a mirror neuron system. This neuron system allows a person to observe and then recreate the actions of others. Mirror neurons are "premotor and parietal cells in the macaque brain that fire when the animal performs a goal directed action and when it sees others performing the same action." It has been proven that the mirror neuron system also allows people to comprehend and understand the intentions and emotions of others. Problems of the mirror neuron system may be correlated with the social inadequacies of autism. There have been many studies done showing that children with autism, compared with typically developing children, demonstrate reduced activity in the frontal mirror neuron system area when observing or imitating facial emotional expressions. Of course, the higher the severity of the disease, the lower the activity in the mirror neuron system is.
Read more about this topic: Imitation
Famous quotes containing the words mirror and/or system:
“We have ourselves to answer for.”
—“Jennie June” Croly 1829–1901, U.S. founder of the woman’s club movement, journalist, author, editor. Demorest’s Illustrated Monthly and Mirror of Fashions, pp. 24-5 (January 1870)
“The violent illiteracies of the graffiti, the clenched silence of the adolescent, the nonsense cries from the stage-happening, are resolutely strategic. The insurgent and the freak-out have broken off discourse with a cultural system which they despise as a cruel, antiquated fraud. They will not bandy words with it. Accept, even momentarily, the conventions of literate linguistic exchange, and you are caught in the net of the old values, of the grammars that can condescend or enslave.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)