A House of Mirrors

“Mirror, mirror in my head, do you honestly reflect my brother’s stead?” by Patrick B. Chew January 3, 2012.

There are many different kinds of neurons specializing in various tasks in our being; however, when I learned of mirror neurons, it really helped answer some tough questions. Questions that hitherto were explained with hocus pokus and metaphysics. 

Mirror neurons were first discovered in the premotor area of the macaque monkeys and later a similar mirror neuron system was discovered in humans. The human version is a  much more sophisticated system than in our monkey cousins. 


The human system also reflects other’s actions; but beyond that, reaches into frontal lobe areas that associate with touch, sight, intention, emotion and potentially more.


How Mirror Neurons Work: 
Article from Society for Neuroscience "Brain Brief" 
September Issue 2008

"You see a stranger stub her toe and you immediately flinch in sympathy. You watch a baseball outfielder run to catch a long fly ball and feel your heart racing and your leg muscles pumping along with him. You notice a friend wrinkle up his face in disgust while tasting some food and suddenly your own stomach recoils at the thought of eating. This ability to instinctively and immediately understand what other people are experiencing has long baffled neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers alike. Recent research now suggests a fascinating explanation: brain cells called mirror neurons.

In the early 1990s, Italian researchers made an astonishing and quite unexpected discovery. They had implanted electrodes in the brains of several macaque monkeys to study the animals’ brain activity during different motor actions, including the clutching of food. One day, as a researcher reached for his own food, he noticed neurons begin to fire in the monkeys’ premotor cortex—the same area that showed activity when the animals made a similar hand movement. How could this be happening when the monkeys were sitting still and merely watching him?

During the ensuing two decades, this serendipitous discovery of mirror neurons—a special class of brain cells that fire not only when an individual performs an action, but also when the individual observes someone else make the same movement—has radically altered the way we think about our brains and ourselves, particularly our social selves."

This is not make-believe. These specialized cells are a real part of almost all of us. Some have it bad and they can almost climb inside you and some not so much. 

Intuition is real. To realize this gift as a tool, one must be able to keep conscious self from vetoing the intuitive feelings. If you can master this, a whole other level of communication opens to you. An articulate level of communication that goes both ways, in and out. Like any form of communication, intuition is a skill that must be practiced to be good at it. 

Something else to remember, this information is part of the conscious play being constructed during the 1/2 second delay in our perceived now. This is an example of epigenetics working at the whole human level, rather than just the cellular scale.

Just like in the cell, the whole being is responding to a perception of the environment. Based on that perception, the whole self allocates resources, defenses and prerecorded strategies to survive.

OK. SO, where is the real action? Remember, this all happens on a non-conscious self level. This is the level where mutual respect training serves so very well. The timing of this sensory system is very interesting considering earlier posts about the timing of now. You begin to respond to others around you before the others have completely initiated the action potential to which you are about to respond. The nature of this response is predicated on the programing of the non-conscious self, about to act. Experience is not what happens to you, but rather what you do with what happens to you.

What do you do, when you don’t know what to do? Flight, fight or freeze. None of which are healthy choices. It is at points like this that one’s transitive state of being is so very important. The transitive state of fear avails one of limited choices. The transitive state of mutual respect, with its pantheon of virtues offers action plans that, by their nature, facilitate well being in the face of life's challenges. 

Warning: objects in the mirror may not be what they appear to be. This is a skill that must be consciously practiced to be confident that the reflections witnessed are truthful. As Ronald Reagan said, “Trust, but verify.” Like I said earlier, some folks are real good at this and some not so much. Do you know which one you are?

And as the officer said, ”This is how accidents happen.”