Michael PorterWow. I was reading about mirror neurons in V. S. Ramachandran’s book, “The Tell-Tale Brain” (Chapter 4).
Apparently these neurons fire (or the “circuit” they’re in fires) when a person performs an action OR they see another person performing the action. The pattern is nearly identical.
So, how does your brain distinguish between someone touching *your* hand, and someone touching someone else’s hand? In either case, the same neurons fire in the same way.
The difference is that if someone touches your hand, there is not only the visual input, but the sensory input from your skin where it is touched. So if your brain doesn’t receive that input, it knows it isn’t being touched. The skin generates a “null signal” that it communicates to the brain, and the brain perceives that its body isn’t the one getting touched.
Ramachandran performed experiments, first on a Gulf War (I) veteran who had lost his hand and had phantom limb syndrome. No hand, no null signal. When the vet watched someone else’s hand getting stroked and tapped, *he* felt those strokes and taps on his phantom hand. Ramachandran repeated the experiment with three other patients and saw the same thing.
He then did an experiment with one of his students, where they anesthetized the nerves connecting her arm to her spinal cord, and she experienced the same effect - she felt the touches that she saw being done to another person’s hand.
Ramachandran: ““Imagine: The only thing separating your consciousnesses from another’s might be your skin!”
🤯
Ronny Pries