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This story is from the category The Brain
Date posted: 23/05/2008 Monash University (Australia) researchers have found that people who are good at interpreting facial expressions have more active mirror neuron systems. Mirror neurons are brain cells that fire both when you do something and when you watch someone else do the same thing. Because they allow us to mimic what others are doing, it is thought that these neurons may be responsible for why we can feel empathy, or understand others' intentions and states of mind. People with autism, for instance, show reduced mirror neuron activity during social cognition tasks. To determine that, volunteers were tested on their ability to recognize faces and judge emotions in pictures, and on the "motor potential" in their thumb muscles: how much the thumb was influenced to move just by watching another thumb moving. Volunteers who were better at judging people's emotions had higher mirror neuron activity in the thumb task. There was no correlation between recognizing faces and this activity. See the full Story via external site: www.newscientist.com Most recent stories in this category (The Brain): 19/06/2013: Brain Can Plan Actions Toward Things the Eye Doesn’t See |
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