Mirrors in Your Thinking When we see someone yawn, we yawn too.
When we watch a spider crawl up someone’s leg, we get creepy sensations on our leg.
When we see someone in danger, we experience a wave of fear.
When we see someone’s arm get jabbed with a sharp needle, the muscles in our arms tense up and our breathing intensifies.
When we watch our favorite Olympic athlete near the finish line to win first place, our heart races with excitement.
How can simply observing others lead us to expe– rience such intense responses so similar to those expe– rienced by the people we are observing?
The answer is found in our brain cells.
A type of neuron, called a mirror neuron, helps explain how we effortlessly “read” other people’s minds and empathize with them — feel what they do.
Mirror neurons automatically put us in somebody else’s shoes.
Not convinced?
Consider brain scan research that finds that romantic partners who observe loved ones in pain show similar activity in their emotional brain areas as that experienced by the loved ones.
It turns out that when we empathize with someone’s pain, on some level we actually feel the same pain!
One fascinating characteristic of mirror neurons is that they are the only brain cells that are activated the same way whether we are “seeing” or “doing.”
These special neurons mirror what the other person is doing.
For instance, when we see someone smiling, our mirror neurons for smiling get activated, which triggers neural activity leading to feelings associated with smiling, such as happiness.
In other words, we get all the benefits of smiling without making even the slightest movement of our lips!