Mirrors in the mind

Neuroscientists and psychologists have previously attributed an individual's understanding of someone else's actions and intentions to a rapid reasoning process not unlike that used to solve a logical problem. But in the early 1990s a research group at the University of Parma in Italy, found a class of neurons in the monkey brain that fire when an individual performs simple goal-directed motor actions, such as grasping a piece of fruit. The surprising part was that these same neurons also fire when the individual sees someone else perform the same act. Because this newly discovered subset of cells seemed to directly reflect acts performed by another in the observer's brain, they were named mirror neurons. Much as circuits of neurons are believed to store specific memories within the brain and sets of mirror neurons appear to encode templates for specific actions.