Home / Concept of the Week / Mirror neurons
Concept of the Week · Episode 1
Brain cells, first found in macaque monkeys in the early 1990s, that fire both when you perform an action and when you watch someone else perform it. In humans the evidence points to a mirroring system rather than a single dedicated neuron.
Where it comes from
Giacomo Rizzolatti and colleagues at the University of Parma, recording from monkeys reaching for food in the early 1990s.
How Peter explained it on the show
Mirror neurons. Peter is sceptical that there is one dedicated neuron sitting there copying other people, but the brain scan evidence is solid: watch someone do something and your own brain lights up in ways that echo what they are doing. It is a good part of why humans learn so well by watching, and a reminder that we are social animals whether we like it or not.
Why it mattered that week
Episode one was recorded the morning Andy Burnham walked into Number 10, and the question was what the job does to a person. Peter's point about mirroring is that we are social animals whether we like it or not: we learn by watching, and a leader's mood, tone and manner are copied by the people around them. It is also why a hopeful message spreads more easily than a fearful one.
Hear it in context
Burnham's first day, Kerr's record and the money myth
Recorded hours before a new Prime Minister takes office: a conversation about leadership, money, attention, and why hope works better than fear.
Questions people ask
That is the popular claim and it runs well ahead of the evidence. What the brain scans show is that watching an action activates some of the same circuits you would use to do it yourself. Whether that is the basis of empathy, or one small part of it, is still argued about. Peter's version on the show is deliberately modest: the mirroring is real, the single magic neuron probably is not.
Because a great deal of human learning happens by observation before it happens by instruction. Children copy adults, apprentices copy craftspeople, and new Prime Ministers copy whichever previous holder of the job they most admired. If your brain rehearses an action while you watch it, watching is already a form of practice.
Other concepts from the series
Authenticity · Confirmation bias · Attribution theory · INUS conditions · Variable ratio reinforcement · Role exit
About the series
Concept of the Week is a regular feature of Experience, the weekly podcast in which clinical psychologist Professor Peter Kinderman and communications expert Hilary Jeffs take the news apart to see what is driving it. Peter picks a psychological idea most of us have half-remembered wrong and explains what it actually shows. New episodes every Tuesday. Where to listen.