Since that time, the term has become a powerful buzz phrase: technical enough to impress at dinner parties simple enough to explain to Grandma sweeter sounding than, say, the Bose-Einstein condensate. Mirror neurons - the tiny neurological structures that fire both when we perceive action and take it, exposing the true social nature of the brain - had been identified. In an equally wonderful truthful account, the neurons in this region did, in fact, fire when the monkeys merely watched researchers handle food.
In a wonderfully fictitious account of the discovery, neuroscientist Giacomo Rizzolatti was licking ice cream in the lab when this same region again fired in the monkeys.
After researchers implanted electrodes into the heads of monkeys, they noticed a burst of activity in the premotor cortex when the animals clutched a piece of food. In the mid-1990s, scientists at the University of Parma, in Italy, made a discovery so novel that it shifted the way psychologists discuss the brain.
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