Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect with Others

In the early summer of 1992 in Schluchsee, a quiet little resort town in Germany's Schwarzwald, a small group of neuroscien-tists were gathered around a television set in the lobby of a local hotel. I had the good fortune to be one of them. The morning session of the scientific meeting we were attending had just ended, and everyone else had gone off to lunch. We had stayed behind at the request of Giacomo Rizzolatti, Professor of Human Physiology at the University Parma, who said he had something exciting to show us and wanted our opinion about what it might mean. He slipped a videotape into the tape deck that he had managed to hook up to the hotel's television set and pushed ''play.'' We found ourselves watching (and listening to) a video that Rizzolatti had made a few weeks earlier in his laboratory in Parma. In the video, a monkey was seated in a primate chair and was reaching out to grasp morsels of food placed in front of it by the experimenter, whom some of the scientists recognized as Rizzolatti's young associate, Leo Fogassi. We heard the familiar ''brrrrp'' of a stream of action potentials every time the monkey grasped a piece of food. Rizzolatti explained that the neuron we were listening to was located in the ventral premotor area, a brain region in the frontal lobes just in front of primary motor cortex, which Rizzolatti and his group had been studying since the early 1980s. So far, nothing on the tape seemed out of the ordinary. The neuron appeared to be coding the movements associated with grasping, just as many other neurons had done in the past when Rizzolatti and his group lowered microelectrodes into this region. Then something quite remarkable happened. The camera turned from the monkey to Leo Fogassi, who now, like the monkey, could be seen picking up pieces of food with his fingers. But as all of us could hear, the neuron continued to fire—and the timing of that firing was locked to Leo's grasping movements! All of us were stunned. Rizzolatti had shown us a neuron that fired not only when the monkey performed a particular action but also when the monkey observed another individual, in fact a member of another species, performing the same action. We didn't know it at the time, but we were among the first to witness a …