Scrolling idly through his feed, Poon saw someone in a clip catch their finger with a knife. He flinched, pulling his own finger back, hand closing tight as though it were his own that hurt — when in reality there was not so much as a scratch on it. His body reacted to what he had seen. It is one of many phenomena in which human beings respond to the actions or emotions of others: yawning because someone else yawned, feeling sad along with a character on screen. These phenomena need not all arise from the same mechanism, but the popular explanation applied to all of them is mirror neurons.

In short: mirror neurons are neurons that respond both when an animal performs an action and when it observes a similar action in another. Brain networks that overlap between observing and doing have been found in humans, though the single-cell evidence remains limited.

What mirror neurons are, and how they were found

The story begins in the early 1990s, when a team of researchers in Italy studying the brains of macaques recorded the activity of individual neurons in regions concerned with movement. What they found, by accident, was that certain cells active while a monkey reached for an object did the same thing while that monkey sat watching a person reach for an object in the way it had done itself.

That is where the name came from — cells that seemed to mirror the action they saw, as though the brain were quietly trying it out inside. The discovery was tremendously exciting at the time, because it suggested that seeing another’s action and performing it oneself might use partly overlapping brain circuits.

Do human beings have mirror neurons?

This is harder to answer than most people think, because we cannot easily record the activity of individual neurons in humans as we can in monkeys. Most of the human evidence therefore comes from brain imaging, which finds that when we watch someone else do something, regions of our own brain concerned with movement are active too.

But evidence of that kind identifies only broad regions of activity. It does not directly demonstrate individual mirror neurons at work. Scientists therefore tend to use more careful terms — the mirror system, or the action observation network — rather than asserting mirror cells.

There have been some human studies recording cells during brain surgery that found cells with mirror-like properties, but they remain very limited and insufficient to settle the larger picture. Put simply, the human evidence supports the view that observing and doing rely on partly overlapping brain circuits — but it cannot be concluded from that evidence alone that those cells serve to understand the intention, the feeling, or the meaning of an action.

Mirror neurons are like an understudy rehearsing in your head

Picture an actor performing center stage. As the lead delivers their lines, the understudy at the side cannot help mouthing along, and may move slightly with the gestures too, as though rehearsing in parallel in case they are needed one day. Our brains appear to do something similar: seeing someone else act, they quietly try it themselves. That overlapping response between seeing and doing may help in matching what is seen to patterns of movement, and in learning by observation.

But this is exactly where care is needed. That the understudy can rehearse along does not mean they understand everything the lead actor feels. Following a gesture and understanding another person’s heart are two different matters. And this is the point at which accounts of mirror neurons tend to run well past where the research reaches.

What has been overstated about mirror neurons

After the discovery in monkeys, mirror neurons were elevated into an explanation for almost everything human — empathy, language, culture, civilization itself. Most of those extensions are speculation running far beyond what the data support.

The most common claim concerns mirror neurons and empathy: that they are the source of our capacity to feel with others. The reality is that empathy is a complex process, relying on many parts of the brain and many factors working together. Attributing all of it to a single group of cells is an overstatement, and a considerable number of academics have argued seriously that the evidence does not support such a conclusion — enough that the misunderstanding has its own name, the mirror neuron myth.

Another claim deserving particular care concerns mirror neurons and autism — the idea that autism arises from a “broken mirror” (the broken mirror theory), proposing that autistic people have a mirror system that functions abnormally. The idea was popular for a period, but most subsequent research has not supported it, and it is now regarded as too simple an explanation and unfair to the diversity of autistic people. Presenting it as established fact is inaccurate and risks creating a misunderstanding that stigmatizes people.

Indeed, some scientists question whether the mirror system is an innate capacity for understanding others at all, proposing instead that it may result from associative learning accumulated across a lifetime — the more often we see and do things together, the more the brain pairs them. That is a different perspective, and one still under debate.

If not mirror neurons alone, how do we feel and learn from others?

What tends to be overlooked is that our capacity to be moved by the feelings of others and to learn from them does not rest on a mirror system alone, but on many processes working together: processing information from facial expression and tone of voice, attention, interpretation of the situation, memory and shared experience with the person in front of us, and systems concerned with understanding others’ thoughts and with social reward. All of these compose the ability to connect with other people, rather than any single mechanism.

Among these processes, two have a broad evidence base and can genuinely be used to understand ourselves. The first is emotional contagion. Human beings can be influenced by the facial expressions, tone, posture and social atmosphere of those around them — though how strongly differs with the person, the relationship and the context, and the phenomenon does not prove mirror neurons to be the only mechanism. The second is learning by observation. From childhood we absorb manner, ways of speaking, and ways of handling emotion from those close to us.

This understanding reminds us to attend to how atmosphere, relationships, and the way people around us treat one another can influence our own inner state. Caring for yourself may therefore include setting boundaries, taking a break from tense situations, and building relational space that feels safe and mutually respectful — without needing to label someone going through difficult emotions as a toxic environment.

At NBRH we work on the principle of Neuro-Behavioral Repatterning & Hypnotherapy: adjusting the nervous system’s patterns of response, and behavior, systematically. The real lesson of mirror neurons is not that one group of cells explains empathy or relationship entirely, but that human behavior arises from many systems working together, influenced by experience, by learning, and by relational context. Lasting change therefore has to work with each person’s particular patterns, rather than relying on a single tidy explanation from the brain.

Since change works through many systems at once, the underlying capacity is what matters — “What Neuroplasticity Is” explains how the brain revises a pattern of response.

What Mirror Neurons Are: What They Explain About Feeling With Others, and What Has Been Overstated