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"A few months ago, a construction worker named Wesley Autrey leapt in front of a moving subway train in New York City to save a stranger who had just collapsed onto the tracks. Five days later, the New York Times speculated that this act of apparent altruism-"I just saw someone who needed help," Autrey said-might be explained by a bunch of cells thought to exist in the human brain, called mirror neurons. The idea that these particular cells might underlie a fundamental human impulse reflects the emergence of a new scientific myth. Like a traditional myth, it captures intuitions about the human condition through vivid metaphors. This isn't the first time that popular science has merged with the popular imagination. In the 1960s, for example, pioneering work on "split-brain" patients revealed real functional differences between the two cerebral hemispheres-an idea that quickly became a metaphor for ancient intuitions about reason and passion. Advertisement Mirror neurons have become the "left brain/right brain" of the 21st century. The idea that these cells could make a hero out of Wesley Autrey began with a genuine and important discovery about the brains of macaque monkeys. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, neuroscientists found a population of cells that fired whenever a monkey prepared to act but also when it watched another animal act. They called these cells "mirror neurons." It didn't take long for scientists and science writers to speculate that mirror neurons might serve as the physiological basis for a wide range of social behaviors, from altruism to art appreciation. Headlines like "Cells That Read Minds" or "How Brain's 'Mirrors' Aid Our Social Understanding" tapped into our intuitions about connectedness. Maybe this cell, with its mellifluous name, gives us our special capacity to understand one another-to care, to learn, and to communicate. Could mirror neurons be responsible for human language, culture, empathy, and morality? "

"The scientists exchanged one last look and held their breath. Everything was ready. The electrode was in place, threaded between the two hemispheres of a living cat's brain; the instruments were tuned to pick up the chatter passing from one half to the other. The only thing left was to listen for that electronic whisper, the brain's own internal code. The amplifier hissed - the three scientists expectantly leaning closer - and out it came, loud and clear. "We all live in a yellow submarine, yellow submarine, yellow submarine ...." "The Beatles' song! We somehow picked up the frequency of a radio station," recalled Michael S. Gazzaniga, chuckling at the 45-year-old memory. "The brain's secret code. Yeah, right!" Dr. Gazzaniga, 71, now a professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is best known for a dazzling series of studies that revealed the brain's split personality, the division of labor between its left and right hemispheres. But he is perhaps next best known for telling stories, many of them about blown experiments, dumb questions and other blunders during his nearly half-century career at the top of his field. "