A group of neuroscientists at the University of Parma discovered, quite by accident, a class of cells inside the brains of monkeys that would fire up when the monkeys were watching other people perform various tasks, such as eating an ice cream cone. The researchers went on to identify neurons in the brains of these primates that mimicked, or mirrored, what others do. The discovery of these reactive cells, or mirror neurons, as the scientists called them, offered the first physical evidence that the phenomenon of brain interconnectedness that researchers had observed in groups might be the
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