I'm taking a Cognitive Psychology class and my professor has been speaking a lot about embodied cognition, or how we "think" with more than just our brain. He also brought up "mirror neurons" which are neurons that fire when we see someone doing something in the same way that they would fire if we were doing them ourselves. Now this was perhaps one of the biggest findings in neuroscience in the last decade. (see Mirror Neurons)
The significance is that mirror neurons testify about our innate wiring to be affected by our environment and the people around us. I find it amazing to think that I can experience what someone is going through simply by seeing them go through it. Apparently, our gut reaction when we see someone getting hurt or crying is something that is hard wired into us. It seems our Creator wanted us to be relational beings.
I think the most exciting part of it is realizing that what we consider to be me actually stretches out beyond our flesh. We are connected to other people and the things around us in ways we simply cannot avoid. We interact with the world and the world interacts with us. As John Donne prophetically wrote, "No man is an island unto himself."
No comments:
Post a Comment