A systems view of biological health

Section 2: Theory

26 : Mirror Neurons and the primacy of movement

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Everything you imagine or sense is converted into movement as a symbolic "lingua franca" for the whole organism.

The rate of muscle firing (about 10Hz) therefore determines the rate at which we can process information that can be used to respond to the physical world with a physical body, and also determines memory (presumably because memories are stored in symbolic form).

Everything you think or imagine, say, see, hear or read (I don’t think I’ve missed anything out) has to be converted into a meaning. When your nervous system evolved there were no such things as fiction novels or Hollywood, so reality was as you experienced it. The external world had to be translated into a biologicalmeaning so that we could respond to it, response equates to movement, and to everything is represented as a meaning by being translated into a real potential movement – i.e. a potential engagement of muscles. In humans and monkeys this representation takes place in Mirror Neurons[1][,] [2] in the pre-frontal cortex (PFC).

The PFC is a zone of the cortex that prepares motions we might possibly make, so it anticipates, and therefore it is not unreasonable for it to anticipate potential responsive movement required by any incoming information, leading to:

Information → Meaning-making (interpreted as movement) →
response (movement)

Muscles have an intrinsic tremor, modulated by the motor nerves through inhibition, that fires at 10Hz (10 cycles per second). This firing rate appears to determine the maximum rate at which we can take in and learn new information – about 10 items of new information per second[3]. Numerous studies on professional memorisers have so far not found anyone who exceeds this rate of information uptake. One conclusion is that movement – sports, musical playing instruments, or even just walking – is an important part of effective education. Another is that the limited window of attention is directly related to the process of meaning making and translation of everything into symbolic form.

Mirrored movements stored in the PMC tend to leak back out as micro-movements, and so the body is always "telling" its meaning-making by subtly feeding that back to the world. This means we subliminally know exactly what someone is thinking, feeling, and how they are responding, whether they are lying, and pet animals and babies and young children can read this like a book.