I had written in this blog in November 2013 about
mirror neurons. My wife and I had played with our new born granddaughter and
found she could imitate simple finger and hand movements within a few weeks of
her birth.
I got so excited documenting this phenomenon that I
threw the baby out with the bath water – figuratively that is! There is a lot
more to mirror neurons than learning finger and hand movements by imitation.
There is some evidence to suggest that mirror neurons can explain one of the
most essential features of being human. You see someone in pain, and you wish
to help. You give someone something, say a toy. You see it makes them happy and
you are pleased. Humans relate to each other and understand innately that they
are like one another – with similar thoughts, similar emotions, similar beliefs
and desires. No one teaches us all this in any detail, but we all understand
this. Psychologists refer to this understanding we have of each other as the “theory
of mind”. Visit
Where would we be without a theory of mind? Cannibals
or worse? Would a human society be possible in the absence of this phenomenon?
This suggests that one can play games with babies and
children to see how they respond to human emotions, real and simulated. Do they
tend to be happier with someone who seems to be happy? Do they show signs of
being depressed if the care giver appears to be depressed? Psychologists invent
games of this kind all the time. The Wikipedia article referred above describes
a fascinating game (the Sally-Anne game) for relatively older children, not
babies. The article also reports that children with autism perform poorly in
this game, which tests for the child having a theory of mind. However, children
with Down’s syndrome do well in this test, as is to be expected by anyone who
has known children with Down’s syndrome.
Another thought was triggered by the following:
It seems that the phenomenon of “adaptation” sets in
when a child watches you do something a lot of times. I understand this as
follows: if you want a baby to imitate you, don’t demonstrate the action many
times before expecting imitation. Imitation comes early on in the experiment. Once
the child imitates you, adaptation will still occur (the child will stop
imitating you!), but it will take a bit longer to take place. It appears, in
other words, that imitated actions seem to be better remembered.
Srinivasan Ramani
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