Mirror neurons are special neurons in the brain that underlie the experience of empathy, and also play a critical function in learning. What makes mirror neurons distinct is that they fire both when performing a certain action, and observing another person, especially of the same species, perform that action. So the neuroactivity is the same whether it's you performing the action or another. Two locations in the brain where mirror neurons have been observed are the premotor cortex and the inferior parietal cortex. Mirror neurons are likely a common neurological feature of many if not all primates.

The phenomenon of mirror neurons proves that seeing really is believing. They underscore the reality that perception is not a one-way conduit from reality to our brains, but rather a complex feedback cycle between the two. We see someone who we think is in pain, and we ourselves can feel a weaker form of that pain. We see someone performing a complex motor action, and we can imagine ourselves performing that action. Mirror neurons are probably a big part of what lets apprentices pick up skills from their masters.

Mirror neurons were originally discovered in macaque monkeys in the 1980s, by Italian neuroscientists Giacomo Rizzolatti, Leonardo Fogassi, and Vittorio Gallese. Since their discovery, mirror neurons have been hailed as one of the most significant recent findings of neuroscience and have been implicated in everything from sensorimotor learning to language learning to folk psychology theories. A deficiency of mirror neurons has been theorized as the underlying neurological reason for the pathology of autism, or "mind-blindness."

The discovery of mirror neurons is intuitively interesting to many people because we have experienced their effects first-hand. Mirror neurons are probably a big part of why emotions such as rage or pleasure can be contagious. They underlie mob psychology. Depending on how vivid a portrayal of someone experiencing a given emotion or performing a particular task is, the more mirror neurons are activated and the more visceral the experience is. This is why movies tend to hit home harder than pictures, which in turn seem more emotionally tangible than text.

Even text, such as the very words you are reading now, activates some category of mirror neurons because most people "hear" text in a voice as they read it. This disembodied voice creates a subtle illusion of the presence of another person undergoing a thought process, and we can empathize with various facets of it on that basis.