Does Monkey See, Monkey Do, Describe You? New Research

At your workplace - monkey see - monkey do? Well...it depends. Researchers recently learned that we resonate more with actions we can already perform. Here're very intriguiging findings that show why and what that means...

Daniel Glaser, at University College, London, studies brain cells called mirror neurons. These cells're active when people jump, twist and turn, give a high five, or simply move their bodies. But the exciting part is that Daniel Glaser and other researchers have discovered mirror neurons activate when we simply observe someone else make those moves. Glaser concludes that watching or doing for these brain cells works precisely in the same way.

And interestingly, to learn more about this phenomenon, Glaser used the Royal Ballet and experts in capoeira, a Brazilian martial art in his quest to know how human experience shapes the way our brains see the world.

"I chose dance because in dance you've got this vocabulary of movement, these standard moves that all dancers can do," Glaser explains. "Also you've got a system of professional regulation—you get to be a professional dancer. So we didn't have to worry about measuring people's skills. We had this whole population of experts that we could just tap right into."

Glaser and his team found results fascinating...

The team zeroed in on results in different areas of the brain. Broadly ... the visual brain, which does the seeing and the movement control brain, or the premotor cortex.

When research participants were lying in the scanner, watching movement, the team hypothesized the visual brain would see differently. However, they were surprised! It was the movement brain that determined whether the style observed was a move that they could perform or not.

Here's Dr. Glaser's take on the findings...

There's a form of resonance if you like, that your own motor control cortex, the bit that would control your own movements, is more excited, it turns out, when you see other people doing moves that you can do. And that's probably because it's resonating with those movements better. It can interpret them in its own terms in a way that it can't when it's seeing a movement style which it doesn't know how to perform.

How might people benefit from this research?

Some people who find it very difficult to read the emotions of others. Among these are people with autistic spectrum disorders. For people who have difficulty reading emotions, one hypothesis, which has not yet been tested, but one possibility is that they have a problem understanding the movements of others, and this may contribute to or have caused their difficulty in reading the emotions of others.

Glaser is excited that there are some disorders which other researchers could help. "Possibilities include disability or spinal injury, right the way through to disorders of emotional cognition," he says, especially "autism—inability to read the states of others."

Here's how Glaser frames his findings overall...

But what we're discovering more and more, and in truth the Greeks and the Renaissance scholars also had an understanding of this, is that vision is an active process. Seeing is a process of projecting what you expect out into the world and constantly matching your experience, your prejudice, your expectation with what's out there. For me the mirror neurons are a particular system which embodies this principle...

So, what does all this have to do with your work? Glaser's research shows in part why it's hard to change the status quo. People naturally fall into comfort zones since they resonate with familiar activities they can do. To learn new movements or skills requires the brain's working memory.

Mirror neuron research can inform professional development or training in many work settings. Though dancers resonate much more watching movements they can do, they also work hard to learn new steps and moves.

In similar ways, critical changes at work tax peoples' working memory. New skills take focus, high energy, time and practice. Thoughts?

More on mirror neurons and Daniel Glaser's work.