imitation more generally. Emmanuel Roze hasfound that the experience of imitating patients makes the young doctors he trainsmore empathetic

In one study, subjects who had watched a videotapedspeech were 33 percent more likely to recall a point from the talk if it wasaccompanied by a gesture. This effect, detected immediately after the subjectsviewed the recording, grew even more pronounced with the passage of time:thirty minutes after watching the speech, subjects were more than 50 percentmore likely to remember the gesture-accompanied points.

reason can also serve empathy and social connection as well as self-interest and let me tell you how this was discovered 00:21:11 because empathy turns out to be physical back in 1996 in Parma Italy a remarkable thing happened in the neuroscience lab 00:21:24 there and I've been there Vittorio galazy was running an experiment for professor ritsu lottie's in which they had macaque monkeys and they were 00:21:36 training the monkeys too they trained them to push buttons and peel bananas and grab rings and do certain things and then they had probes in the monkeys brains neuron by neuron in what is 00:21:50 called the premotor cortex which choreographed actions it sort of puts actions together and they were looking at which neurons fired when the monkeys did which actions they had it hooked up to a computer so every time the monkey 00:22:03 moved and did this versus peel the banana etc you would see exactly which neurons were firing the monkey breast something you would see which neurons are firing and if he grasped with the right hand to be one set left hand 00:22:15 another set et cetera and this was going just fine then it was lunchtime and in Italy you take a nice lunch so you take a nice lunch for toriel comes back didn't have dessert as a pile 00:22:29 of bananas thank you take a banana he starts to peel it and he finds that the computer is registering click click click click click that the monkey's brain which we're supposed to register 00:22:42 register monkey movements is registering his movements and when they checked it out it turns out these were exactly at least 1/3 of the neurons firing 30% 00:22:54 actually will were the neurons for peeling bananas then they did further experiments and they found out that there was an interesting phenomenon that 00:23:06 there's a connection between vision and action that the same neurons that are firing when you peel a banana are firing when you see someone else peel a banana 00:23:18 well not quite all of them 30% the other 70% are doing interesting variations on that but those 30% are interesting they're called mirror neurons they mirror what you're doing and they link 00:23:31 vision in action and then they found out why there is a neural pathway Direction directly between the premotor cortex and the parietal cortex just behind it that 00:23:45 integrates a vision and they are you know tuned as you're growing up to length vision and action so that vision and action are linked together but then the other interesting thing is that 00:23:58 mirror neurons are connected to the emotional regions and emotionally something wild was discovered back in 00:24:09 the 1950s and 60s by Paul Ekman namely that we have a physiology that corresponds to our emotions Darwin first hypothesized this that around the world 00:24:23 when people are happy they smile when they're sad they frown when they're angry they bare their teeth etc and animals do a lot of the same things 00:24:35 and that basically there are other physiological adji of emotions when you're angry your skin temperature rises half a degree which is why you say my blood boils you know why you get burned 00:24:49 up and so on there's a reason for that those metaphors are for anger are based on your actual physiology and that physiology of anger is tied to the mirror neurons because the physiology 00:25:02 has to do with what your body is doing and if it's connected to vision you can see with someone else's body cuz doing and you can tell if somebody is writhing in pain or deliriously happy or really 00:25:15 sad or whatever you are emotionally connected to other people Briah your brain you have a brain and everybody else has the capacity for 00:25:29 what's called empathy it's a physical capacity linking you to others and that's how social connection works that is a physical thing and actually most 00:25:41 the reason Oh a huge amount is based on social connection and empathy it's not just self-interest and that's important for many reasons having to do with 00:25:52 morality and with politics