19. Aggression III

Stanford University.

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So back a little bit.

Still back in the neurobiology.

Back to the anterior cingulate.

Remember anterior cingulate again.

All that empathy stuff, feeling somebody else's pain.

That business about something metaphorical,

something symbolic about pain and empathy

is happening in there.

Something people have been speculating

about for about 10 years now has to do

with a class of neurons that have come

to be called mirror neurons.

Mirror neurons were first identified

in motor parts of the cortex, parts that

tell you which muscles to move.

And these are neurons that don't get excited

when you are, for example, moving your arm like this.

And they don't get excited if you're watching somebody

moving their arm like this.

But they do get excited if both of you

are doing it at the same time or closely in time with each other

if they're mirroring each other.

So people took a look at this and this

immediately became an area of a lot of research.

And from the first nanosecond when people were discussing

mirror neurons, of course what they were immediately

talking about is this is some neuronal cellular basis

of empathy, feeling somebody else's pain.

That sort of thing.

There's got to be mirror neurons in the anterior cingulate

that's doing more abstract versions of feeling somebody

else's actions and feeling somebody else's feelings

and all that sort of thing.

Totally irresistible.

There has not been a paper written

on the neurobiology of empathy in the last decade

without the word mirror getting some place or other in there.