Why Children PL AY the Way They Do PART 5 Imitation Role Play—At Every Age by Nancy Zwiers, CEO, Funosophy Inc.
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ole play is one of the most common play patterns we see in children of all ages. It involves children imagining that they are someone else and mimicking the behavior they associate with that person, whether it’s a real or fictional character. Why is this play pattern so ubiquitous? The answer lies in the recently discovered Mirror Neuron System.
The Mirror Neuron System During the ’90s, an Italian team of scientists in Parma, Italy, were studying the motor cortex in macaque monkeys. Electrodes were wired into the monkeys’ brains, measuring brain activation as the monkeys performed certain motions with their hands, including feeding themselves peanuts and other sundry treats.
82 • THE TOY BOOK
One day, the researchers went out for lunch and left the monkeys wired as per usual. However, when one of the researchers came back eating an ice cream cone, they made an amazing discovery. When the monkey watched the researcher eating the ice cream cone, its brain was activated in the same way as if he had been eating the cone himself. In the ensuing two decades, neuroscientists have rounded out their understanding of the Mirror Neuron System in humans, and the bottom line conclusion is that this brain system is responsible for the leaps in evolutionary progress humans have made as inherently social beings. It turns out that the Mirror Neuron System is how we learn from others without having to wait for information to be encoded in our genome over generations. Consider these findings about mirror neurons: • When we see someone perform an action, our motor strip lights up in the same areas as if we were performing the action ourselves. • Even when we speak about, hear, or imagine an action, our motor strip lights up as if we were performing that action ourselves. • This ability also extends to emotions. When we see someone’s facial expression conveying an emotion such as anger, joy, or fear, the emotion is contagious—we actually process the emotion in our brain as if we were feeling it firsthand. Scientists now believe that mirror neurons are the seat of empathy. Our ability to know what someone else is thinking or feeling is critical to our survival as a social being, and how else do we human beings learn all this? Even as infants, we are wired to observe and imitate; think about the 8-week-old newborn returning
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2014