Mirror neurons are a type of brain cell that is activated both when performing an action and when observing another individual perform that same action, a process thought to help an individual ...

In the mid-1990s, scientists at the University of Parma, in Italy, made a discovery so novel that it shifted the way psychologists discuss the brain. After researchers implanted electrodes into the ...

Nat Clin Pract Neurol. 2009;5(1):24-34. Studies in which the properties of single neurons were studied in a naturalistic context have been particularly important for establishing this new view on ...

In recent years, neuroscientists have identified certain neurons in the brain that have been labeled as “mirror neurons.” These mirror neurons fire when observing behavior in a very similar manner ...

In three new independent studies, researchers have deepened our understanding of the remarkable ability of some specialized areas of the brain to activate both in response to one's own actions and in ...

New research suggests that scientists could make a good guess based on how the brain responds when people watch someone else experience pain. The study found that those responses predict whether ...

For 20 minutes Andrea McColl, a research assistant at the University of Southern California, has been repeating the same string of nonsense syllables, changing her intonation on cue. When a smiling ...

Sometimes scientific progress emerges from accidental findings. In the 1980s a group of Italian neuroscientists in the laboratory of Giacomo Rizzolatti, in Parma, implanted microelectrodes into motor ...

Ever since the discovery of mirror neurons, those central nervous system cells have been of great interest to neuroscientists, psychologists and neurology specialists alike. Mirror neurons show ...

A. C. Grayling’s essay (3 May, p 50), with its leap in argument from diffuse flashes of neuron activity to universal morality, is a series of non sequiturs. Whether one performs an action, or observes ...