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Mirrors in Your Thinking When we see someone yawn, we yawn too.

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When we watch a spider crawl up someone’s leg, we get creepy sensations on our leg.

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When we see someone in danger, we experience a wave of fear.

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When we see someone’s arm get jabbed with a sharp needle, the muscles in our arms tense up and our breathing intensifies.

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When we watch our favorite Olympic athlete near the finish line to win first place, our heart races with excitement.

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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?

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The answer is found in our brain cells.

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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.

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Mirror neurons automatically put us in somebody else’s shoes.

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Not convinced?

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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.

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It turns out that when we empathize with someone’s pain, on some level we actually feel the same pain!

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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.”

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These special neurons mirror what the other person is doing.

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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.

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In other words, we get all the benefits of smiling without making even the slightest movement of our lips!