Added by Mark Spencer, ITANLP Trainer, Educator and Coach
A mirror neuron is a neuron that fires both when an animal or human acts and also when the human or animal observes the same action performed by another.
From an NLP perspective, we would say that the functions of Mirroring were discovered 20 years earlier by Grinder [...]

Many of the skills that Derren Brown is using are pure genius. Not everything here is meant to be done at home – that is not our intention for showing these. These videos are brilliant examples in some cases of deep rapport, language skills and anchoring – showing just how things can happen. [...]

Loneliness is infectious according to a study cited in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology for Dec/09. http://www.apa.org/journals/psp

Is this the work of those Mirror Neurons again? “Before losing their friends, lonely people transmit feelings of loneliness to their remaining friends, who also become lonely. Because loneliness is associated with mental and physical diseases that [...]

The original mirror-neuron concept, involving observation in another of an intentional, meaningful, goal-directed action, is clearly motor, unlike synaesthesia for touch or for pain, and may play a key role in action-understanding and imitative learning, even perhaps the acquisition and evolution of language, skills, and tool manufacture and use. Thus, to understand the goal of another person’s behaviour, we must not only match it against our own motor system, but also covertly imitate the other’s action. Indeed, forty years ago, the Motor Theory of Speech Perception proposed that we understand another’s speech by covertly and subvocally recreating, in real time, the speaker’s likely mouth movements, rather than by merely following the speech sounds. This year dramatic support came from the finding that what you hear when listening to ambiguous samples like ‘head’ and ‘had’ is influenced by externally-induced experimental deformations of the skin around your lips; you almost literally hear with your mouth! The old motor theory of speech perception clearly anticipated features of the mirror neuron hypothesis. It is also compatible with the widely-held belief that verbal language evolved from gestural communication, rather than from earlier primate patterns of vocalisation.