Mirror Neurons At Work

I’ve gotten a good lesson on the power of mirror neurons lately.  It’s been fascinating.

In my class that I teach to law enforcement, I play multiple videos that show intense emotions.  Usually while the videos play, I take a seat facing the audience off to the side of the class. I typically can’t see the video because I want to be out the way and not infringing on the screen so my audience gets the be possible view.

When I videos play, I often find something to distract myself, but inevitably, there are a few minutes where I am waiting for the video to end and it is at ths time that I am facing the students.

Multiple times now I have felt a flush of emotion come over me when look at students, and I’ve realized when this happened that I am looking at a person who is intensely feeling the emotions of the person in the video they are watching. 

I just never knew how powerful mirror neurons could be that they could affect a person watching a video and also affect me, who is not watching the video, but watching the person who is watching the video.

I have seen these videos hundreds of times so they don’t affect me anymore. I have become desensitized to them over time, but clearly I am not desensitized to others who are reacting to them.

Isn’t that bizarre? 

I have felt my eyebrows go oblique only to realize I am starring at a young mom who feels great pain seeing a parent plea for their missing child.

It’s been absolutely astounding to experience.

I always enjoy pointing it out to my students that when you just watched that video of a desparate mom, you four displayed strong signals of sadness.  They typically have no idea their eyebrows knitted together in an “A shape” but they do acknowledge they did feel pain or heartbreak for the people in the video.

It’s incredibly fascinating.

I wonder if psychopaths have a short-circuit when it comes to mirror neurons? I suspect they do!