Monkey See, Monkey Do

If you're like me and seem to have a hard time getting out of bed, maybe you've experienced not getting to eat breakfast because you're going to be late. In this video, Sarah Carey teaches us how to make a complete breakfast which can be held and eaten in one hand. You might want to make it the night before and in the morning, you can just pop into your microwave for a few seconds and viola! Breakfast in the palm of your hand. 

Video Credit: [1]

With the technological advancements being made today, gaining new knowledge is made easier. The personal computer makes it easier to write papers (no more correction fluid and carbon paper!), google scholar has replaced library work for research, the iPod has given us a way to enjoy music anywhere (without the burden of bringing a boom box), and tablets and kindle have replaced books, creating a handier and arguably more environment friendly way of reading. 

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Before, learning new skills like sewing, cooking, and playing an instrument required that you have someone personally teaching you, and giving you feedbacks, but with the invention of youtube.com, this has changed. Not only do they teach you how to do these things, youtubers (is that what you call them?) also teach you techniques they’ve learned from experience, and tips and tricks that will help you in your endeavor to improving your skill. 

When we watch these people when we try to learn something, our tendency is to imitate these people—to the smallest, littlest detail. We tend to mimic every hand movement, every flick of the wrist, just to try and recreate what we are seeing. According to Goldstein (2010), we have neurons in our brains that fire when we do a specific action and when we someone else doing it. These neurons are called mirror neurons.

Video Credit: [2]

In social psychology, I encountered mirror neurons when we were talking about conformity. We talked about how seeing people yawn, makes us yawn as well, and this activates mirror neurons. I think it's interesting how Ramachandran explains that unlike the Darwinian theory of evolution, mirror neurons allowed our ancestors to 'learn' survival by simply watching someone else. We learn from someone else's experience.

He also explains in the video that another 'function' of these mirror neurons is to empathize. When we are being touched on our arm, the mirror neurons that fire will also fire when we see someone else being touched. The only reason we don't feel anything is because the receptors on our skin tells our brain that we aren't actually being touched-- that although we know the feeling of being touched, we're not the one being touched. We see here the importance of the bottom-up process. If our receptors did not correct our brain, we would feel what the other person is feeling by simply looking at them. So we see that the fact that although our brain tells us that we should be feeling something, we re-check this information with our receptors and since it tells us that, no, we're not being touched, cancels out the 'feeling' that we are being touched.

The brain is such a complex thing, don't you agree?