Clearly this is at the bedrock of why acting works in the first place: we literally feel what we see others feeling. Sophie's up on the screen trying to decide between her two children, and I'm crying-- why? I know it's not real, and yet I feel it as if it were not only really happening to the actress (which it isn't), but happening to me. Why?

It also goes to a long-held theory of mine. Many actors try to recreate (that is, really feel deeply) the emotions of the character. (This is "method".) But I believe it's not incumbent on me as an actor to feel the feelings, but rather to make YOU feel the character's feelings (whether I do that by really feeling them myself or by doing a good enough imitation). This article put science to it: it's incumbent on me to trigger your mirror neurons, and again, whether I do that by feeling the feelings deeply or pretending to, it's all the same. The difference is, we are so tuned to read body language, facial expression, etc., that an imitation has to be beyond good to trick the audience's mirror neurons into playing along (which is why many actors just go ahead and try to generate the real feeling, it's easier to achieve that than try to generate each silent clue that accompanies the feeling).

We've so long maintained that there's no science in our art, and therefore it's impossible to quantify and hard to explain. It's interesting to think there IS science behind it, and what that means for actors as we try to connect with our audiences and make them feel for us.

i am very happy to hear that there is research for all our emotions. we are so misunderstood as 'human beings' and our emotions judge us as well as run us and it helps to know what it is that goes right or wrong when it does happen. i've studied only the surface aspect of emotions. we are all suffering from a form of 'depervasion syndrome'..it nice to know that research paid off this time where we can at least understand that part of ourselves that we can't seem to control and that we're not known as crazy since there is a 'scientific answer' we can address with others! thank you!!

Alan Greenspan and the rugged individualists may love Ayn Rand's libertarian vision of each person alone against the world

That bunk went out after the British Social Darwinist, Herbert Spencer, was exposed for the fraud he was. Trying to use natural selection (from Darwinian evolution) in a social context. Recall it was Spencer, when he wrote a series of propaganda before his visit to the U.S. - who insisted it is right that people should die if they cannot fend for themselves, and hence no support of the state ought to artificially prolong their genes.

Well, I've yet to see a rightist do without props or state support, and until they do sir Allan is talking twaddle and we know Rand lost it in her later years, became a psycho case and had to have ECT.

When hedge funds start collapsing, and sub-prime bogus bonds go sour, these apes are the first to scream for the "Mommy" goverment to bail their asses out. They profess the hard hand of markets but can't live by them themselves. For history, look at the S&L bailout in the 80s and the bailout of Long Term Capital Management in 1997 - and now the subprime schmucks get their widdo hands held by the Fed in interest rate cuts.

These fuckers talk a good talk, but in the end it is BS pure and simple.

Mirror neurons would seem to explain more than altruism. They might also explain why crackpot ideas, racism, bad taste, and other unhelpful attitudes spread through cultures like wildfire.

To take just one example: It used to be that if you wore cowboy boots and jeans and had a gun rack hanging in the back window of your pickup while you drove around listening to country-western music, you probably lived in Texas or Oklahoma. Now it's a nationwide phenomenon. Grown men in the northern urbs, who have never seen a steer, affect the look and demeanor of cowboys, while presidents act as they imagine cowboys would act to corral weapons of mass destruction. Fightin' and drinkin' and chewin' and cussin' and drawlin' and joshin' and insistin' that no one cross the figurative barbed-wire fence demarcating their intellectual high Sierra.

Sit down and listen to a John Cage or Schoenberg concert, and, I'll wager, your mirror neurons won't soon be signifying with these unaccustomed ways of thinking. No, your brain is evidently hard-wired to go find examples of cultural expression that validate your pre-existing biases, and then help you crystalize them, the way a viral infection crystallizes in your cells.

And so we have all the ritualistic, toe-tappin' jive of, for example, the entire country-western lifestyle. One look, and you're practically kinfolk.

Damn you, mirror neurons!

"...creating codependent realities..."

Most references note 'codependent' in the unhealthy sense and prefer 'interdependent' for the sense indicating mutual support.

(just to be seriously pedantic :-)

>> “Now we know that a direct experience is responsible”

Nope. Now we know that the addition of an intermediate simulation further separate us.

At the same time as it gives the connection weight by replicating in us the feelings felt (or that we think are felt) in another.

The mirror neurons are a simulated other, on whom we project what WE think he feels and acts

I do not see how this could explain emphathy, if anything it makes it more difficult.

Regards JakobA

You're welcome.

that there are many many people missing mirror neurons, if they do cause people to be altruistic and compassionate.

That tosses most of psychotherapy out the window. Sorry dudes go find another job.

Thanks for the inspiration. But first, what religions? I certainly didn't make a religious reference in my initial post, simply was groping for a way to say what you have now helped me come to, which is this: With this sort of research and "eureka" moments which pronounce something so because it seems like it might, empirically, make sense, what we are reduced to is a glob of cells, chemicals, mirror neurons, etc., somehow pooling together in such a way as to feel the compulsion to explain their own existence through physiology and chemistry, none of which would exist without those globs of brain stuff deciding to look inward that way. The result, if we are to accept it whole, is that some collections of cosmic crud are smarter than those we "think" of as "us", and we need to chemically fall back in awe of the discovery of our being by the being of some other cosmic accident floating around in the ether aimlessly, having accidentally fallen together in such a way as to be able to understand itself and how it "thinks" without any regard for the humanness -- which is the real mystery, the real discovery, and the enduring puzzle.

Again, what religion or religions were you referring to? You by any chance one of those neoatheists who feels threatened by mystery and reflexively sees that in others as "religion", something that poses a threat to the "progress" of "human" "thought"?

Just curious, but also grateful that you somehow, without me mirroring anything I am aware of (or care to be), triggered a stream of consciousness in the neurochemical mishap which is "me", which expresses, to my satisfaction, what is so utterly orthodox and religious in the Slack pontification.

See?