A Swedish/British entrepreneur in Berlin, trying to make it happen

Quote from Michael Goldhabers The Value of Openness in an Attention Economy:

First of all, one pays attention to another person, not directly as a whole, but through that person’s actions, expressions, emotions and thoughts. Suppose you are at a tennis tournament, watching a singles match. As you focus on one of the players, you begin to recognize what the player is doing through the action of certain nerve connections or neuron chains in your own brain. If you see the player raising the racquet over her head, you recognize the action through activating exactly the neuron chain of your own that would cause your own arm to lift over your own head. You activate the chain – that is, the nerves fire — but, unless you are quite abnormal, you actually move either not at all or only very slightly. This is the phenomenon now called neural mirroring.

Neural mirroring was a great chance discovery3, originally made in Parma, Italy, about 1991 when a graduate student walked into a lab where rhesus macaque monkeys were being studied with an unusual apparatus. The lab’s neuroscientists had managed to wire up the chain of neurons activated each time one rhesus monkey lifted a peanut to its mouth. They then connected the wire not only to some sort of recorder, as would be customary for neuroscientists, but to a loudspeaker, so they could easily note every time the chain fired. That way, whenever the neuron chain was activated, they could turn and observe what the monkey was up to.

Then the graduate student happened to walk in licking an ice cream cone. Or perhaps he was standing by a bowl of fruit and picked up a banana, peeled it and began to eat it. Stories differ. In any case, as the ice-cream cone or banana reached the student’s mouth, the loudspeaker went off. But the monkey was doing nothing except staring at the student. It was clearly paying attention to the student’s action by invoking what its own similar action would do in its own brain (or mind).

Funny observation over on Teds blog