The cells are a special type of "mirror neurons," which are thought to aid understanding of the actions and intentions of others. Mirror neurons fire both when you do something, like grab a bottle of wine, and when you watch another person do the same thing. Instead of carrying out a step-by-step reasoning process to figure out why a friend is grabbing a bottle of wine, we instantly understand what's going on inside his head because it's going on in our heads too.
Now, researchers have discovered some mirror neurons don't just care about what another individual is doing, they also care about how far away they're doing it, and, more importantly, whether there's potential for interaction.
"This was very surprising for us," said Antonino Casile of the University of Tübingen in Germany, co-author of the research, published in Science Thursday. "The current view about mirror neurons is that they might underlie action understanding. But the distance at which an action is performed plays no role in understanding what the others are doing."
