Mirror Neurons and Empathy?

I was listening to a podcast recording of Kathy Sierra from the Creating Passionate Users website; she was giving a talk where she talked a bit about a kind of pseudo-mindreading ability we naturally possess thanks to parts of our brains made of mirror neurons. These are pretty darn neat.

Turns out there are parts of your brain that fire both when you do something and when you observe something happening.

In other words, if you're a chef, certain parts of your brain will fire up as you recall recipe and food information and as you perform functions like mixing and whisking your culinary concoctions. As we train the brain, those parts become more trained, making the task easier.

When these chefs see other chefs...or nonchefs...cooking, these same areas of the brain will fire up, as if they're doing what they're seeing. It's kind of like training the brain without doing anything.

In the talk, Kathy said that this was discovered when a researcher walked into a room where a monkey was wired for an experiment that involved neuro-mapping. The researcher was eating an ice cream cone, and each time he licked it the sensors blipped in a part of the monkey's brain that should have gone off only if the monkey was eating the ice cream cone...but the monkey was sitting and watching the researcher.

Neat, huh?

There's some evidence to suggest that people don't have or use mirror neurons. It's controversial to some degree, but apparently it's another field of study since it was proposed. I became kind of curious though...what if empathy, the ability to "put yourself in another person's shoes", is an extension of mirror neurons at work? Or maybe a mix of mirror neurons running a virtual simulation in our heads (the process, in theory, happens subconciously; we're unaware of it happening) mixing with our ability to evaluate consequences of actions?

I'm not a scientist nor is neurology a pet hobby. I haven't any idea how accurate this could be much in the same way that every armchair politician seems to think he knows what's best in Washington. But I still think this is an interesting tidbit of information and am curious about the implication of mirror neurons and how their existence could have implications for learning.

I suppose it's kind of disconcerting to think that most of American teenagers are doing nothing more than reinforcing how to slack off and text each others' cell phones...