Page |78 between observing action and brain known to coordinate movements. understanding emotion. This link has These recording machines note brain been most clearly demonstrated in the activity both visually, as a graph on a case of facial expressions — if I observe screen, and auditorily, by a loud series of the muscles of the face in a position to clicks, indicating the firing of a neuron. convey an emotional state, clearly I Rizzolatti and his team were focusing on perceive the emotion. What has been a particular region in the front of the shown recently is that observing such brain, and were having the monkey facial expressions leads to two kinds of perform all sorts of hand, mouth, and brain activations in the observer: The eye movements to see how the brain first set of regions activated are those cells were organized to make these that would be used by the observer to movements happen. One day (or so the execute the identical face movements, story goes), one of the researchers just as with hand or mouth movements. returned from lunch while the electrical However, additional regions are also recordings were being made, and was active, and these are precisely the ones finishing off a cone of superb Italian that would be involved if the observer gelato, when all of a sudden the were to feel the observed emotion recording device starting making a loud personally. Thus the circuitry for action series of clicks. The returning scientist observation in the human brain is stopped licking his ice cream cone to see interdependent with parts of the brain what was going on, and the noise critical for understanding more complex stopped. When he restarted licking his nuanced aspects of the world. gelato, the clicks resumed, and when he Miteror Nearans stopped again, they stopped. The investigators had discovered a type of It turns out that there may be neuron that was sensitive to the monkey cellular building blocks in the brain that observing a particular human action. a