Mirror Neurons-Mason Keller

Have you ever wondered why we feel the pain others feel when getting injured or rejected, or the happy feelings someone gets when their significant other proposes? The answer to that question would be mirror neurons. Mirror neurons in the brain of animals and humans activate during observational learning, they fire when someone performs an action and when someone watches someone else perform the same action. We watch someone do something we experience it with them. When someone scrapes their knee on the concrete we somehow feel that pain even though our knee is perfectly ok. Mirror neurons help us experience and feel the things others we watch and observe are experiencing and feeling. This one movie I watched called Frozen was about three people who get stuck on a ski lift. They are stuck there for days in the freezing cold up on a ski lift with no one there to help or rescue them. The one character decides to try and jump off the ski lift. He lands and breaks both of his legs. The scene shows his knees all bloody with the bone sticking out while he is screaming in pain telling his friends on the lift how he cant feel his legs and how the bone is sticking out. Watching this scene and even writing about it makes me extremely uncomfortable, the feeling I get in my stomach thinking about that and the weak, weird feeling I get in my knees is a reaction I get because of mirror neurons. Even though my knees aren’t broken and my bones aren’t sticking out I still feel as if they were. I am observing and watching someone else experience an injury like this, a pain like this, and the mirror neurons in my brain activate making me feel a feeling as though I was the one in that situation. There are so many feelings and experiences mirror neurons make us experience, a way for us to understand others pain, others happiness and sadness. All of these feelings we feel and don’t know why we feel them are because of mirror neurons.