In the mid-1990s, scientists at the University of Parma, in Italy, made a discovery so novel that it shifted the way psychologists discuss the brain. After researchers implanted electrodes into the ...

Mirror neurons are a type of brain cell that is activated both when performing an action and when observing another individual perform that same action, a process thought to help an individual ...

For 20 minutes Andrea McColl, a research assistant at the University of Southern California, has been repeating the same string of nonsense syllables, changing her intonation on cue. When a smiling ...

The brain has many regions that perform different functions. Have students use a map of the brain and brain stem to locate these regions: frontal lobe, parietal lobe, occipital lobe, temporal lobe, ...

Scientists have pinpointed a group of cells in the brain whose activity could help explain the ability to share another’s pain. Why can we feel other people’s pain? A recent study in rats investigates ...

New research suggests that scientists could make a good guess based on how the brain responds when people watch someone else experience pain. The study found that those responses predict whether ...

Sometimes scientific progress emerges from accidental findings. In the 1980s a group of Italian neuroscientists in the laboratory of Giacomo Rizzolatti, in Parma, implanted microelectrodes into motor ...

In recent years, neuroscientists have identified certain neurons in the brain that have been labeled as “mirror neurons.” These mirror neurons fire when observing behavior in a very similar manner ...

Ever since the discovery of mirror neurons, those central nervous system cells have been of great interest to neuroscientists, psychologists and neurology specialists alike. Mirror neurons show ...

It is wartime. You and your fellow refugees are hiding from enemy soldiers, when a baby begins to cry. You cover her mouth to block the sound. If you remove your hand, her crying will draw the ...