Mirror Neurons & the Birth of Civilization

In Light Sonata, Rupert, the young pianist, has been told to go mad by his teacher, the antithesis of Charlie’s effort to “heal” him. After leading Charlie through several experiments at his Institute of Experimental Neuroscience and Psychiatry, including the scenes with the monkeys, Baxter says, “One thing is certain: Our visions will shift when the monkey in the light goes mad for us.” Rupert, in the light of the stage—and in the light of his hallucinations—would be going mad for the benefit of the audience. Why? And how would such a thing work? The startling answers partly lie in mirror neurons. 

In addition to Ramachandran’s comments about mirror neurons in the movie above, here are further distinctions from an excerpt from his book A Tell-Tale Brain: A neuroscientist’s quest for what makes us human:

 Although mirror neurons allow you to tentatively adopt another person’s vantage point, they don’t result in an out-of-body experience. You don’t literally float out to where that other vantage point is, nor do you lose your identity as a person. Similarly, when you watch another person being touched, your “touch” neurons fire, but even though you empathize, you don’t actually feel the touch. It turns out that in both cases, your frontal lobes inhibit the activated mirror neurons at least enough to stop all this from happening so you can remain anchored in your body. Additionally, “touch” neurons in your skin send a null signal to your mirror neurons, saying, “Hey, you’re not being touched” to ensure that you don’t literally feel the other guy being touched. Thus in the normal brain a dynamic interplay of three sets of signals (mirror neurons, frontal lobes, and sensory receptors) is responsible for preserving both the individuality of your own mind and body, and your mind’s reciprocity with others—a paradoxical state of affairs unique to humans. Disturbances in the system, we shall see, would lead to a dissolution of interpersonal boundaries, personal identity, and body image—allowing us to explain a wide spectrum of seemingly incomprehensible symptoms seen in psychiatry. For example, the derangements in frontal inhibition of mirror-neuron system may lead to a disturbing out of body experience—as though you were really watching yourself from above. Such syndromes reveal how blurred the boundary between reality and illusion become under certain circumstances (pg. 262).