Word: mirrored
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...Will Hollywood take any lessons from this poll - say, to make movies with, and for, older people. Nah. The moguls have read the small print in the Harris poll, and noted that it was weighted for many variables, but not to mirror the average age of moviegoers. Its respondents were all 18 and over. And that is, pretty much, a demographic the studios ignore. Hollywood takes its own poll every weekend, at the box office, and there the kids, as they have been for 30 years...
...authorship of voluntary actions can also be an illusion, the result of noticing a correlation between what we decide and how our bodies move. The psychologist Dan Wegner studied the party game in which a subject is seated in front of a mirror while someone behind him extends his arms under the subject's armpits and moves his arms around, making it look as if the subject is moving his own arms. If the subject hears a tape telling the person behind him how to move (wave, touch the subject's nose and so on), he feels...
Brain scans have now indirectly established the presence of similar monkey-see-monkey-do neurological activity in human subjects, and mirror neurons, to use the term the University of Parma team coined, have emerged as a compelling biological explanation for a broad range of brain activity, from a newborn's instant response to a mother's smile to a movie audience's gasps during a particularly effective chase scene...
Indeed, there are multiple if still tenuous lines of evidence to suggest that neural networks with mirror properties may be responsible for the empathetic response that forms the root of social behavior. They may also help explain how human language emerged from the more primitive communication systems of monkeys and apes. Almost seven years ago, Vilayanur Ramachandran, head of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California at San Diego, went so far as to declare that "mirror neurons will do for psychology what DNA did for biology: they will provide a unifying framework and help explain...
That may overstate the case. Even enthusiasts agree that there are limits to how much mirror neurons can explain. At the same time, says Christian Keysers, scientific director of the neuroimaging center at University Medical Center Groningen in the Netherlands, their discovery provides sharp insight into the mechanisms by which humans communicate their innermost desires and feelings. "When you sit in a chair and watch a movie," Keysers observes, "you don't have to think to yourself, 'Now the hero has this expression on his face, so he must be afraid.' Or, 'Now he is smiling, so he must...