In C. Fred Alford’s essay “Mirror Neurons, Psychoanalysis, and the Age of Empathy”, Alford discusses the way mirror neurons have brought new ways to understand the intentions of others. Mirror neurons where discovered by researcher Giancomo Rizzolatti in Parma, Italy. He began his studies on monkeys as he had implanted wires next to their frontal lobes region of the brain to monitor the activity of the monkeys planning and movements. One of the researchers walked into the lab with an ice cream cone in hand and the monkey just stared at him. He moved the cone up to his mouth and he monkey’s monitor beeped, but the monkey did not even move, it was all in its head. Rizzolatti discovered that a monkey’s neurons fired when they grasp, hold, or tear something and also fired when the monkey observes another doing so (Myers 307). …show more content…
They have a significant way of responding identically to an action that you could intend or someone else intends. Mirror neurons are best understood for coding non-verbal actions. This made a new way of understanding empathy. Empathy is a feeling of what the other individual is feeling. Alford’s psychological approach can be applied to the narrator, a newborn who has been thrown in the trash chute of a building that has ten stories by her nineteen-year-old mother in John Edgar Wideman’s story “Newborn Thrown in Trash and Dies” because she has a vast intellect for a newborn who is only a couple hours old. The newborn has extraordinary knowledge because she biologically knows about life through our natural development of mirror neurons which intentionally helps us create empathy with one