Seed: How We Know

Seed: How We Know: "This revealed the essential connection between learning and doing. The human mind understands the world by interacting with it. When we see an inanimate object that we are familiar with, our mirror neurons instinctively imagine what they could do with that object. A tennis racquet causes our cells to imagine swinging it; a violin causes our cells to imagine playing it. If you happen to be taught algebra by Bob Moses, a math equation might trigger thoughts of taking the subway. A separate brain imaging study has shown that our mirror neurons can even be activated by the sound of words. When we say 'tennis' or 'violin' or 'algebra,' cells in our motor cortex automatically get excited.

What's the point of all this neural activity? Mirror neurons let us comb the world for practical things. Because they translate our ideas into actions, they naturally focus on whatever ideas we know how to use, ignoring the abstract and the theoretical. This makes evolutionary sense. The brain, after all, is an adaptive organ: It evolved to help us cope with a world full of concrete problems, not so that we could excel at metaphysics. (As Goethe quipped, 'In the beginning was the deed.') And even though mirror neurons are just a small cluster of cells, their predilection for action is an essential part of the human mind. They have been implicated in every"