MIRROR NEURONS FOR EDUCATION Patricia Schober, Barbara Sabitzer Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt (AUSTRIA) pschober@edu.uni-klu.ac.at, Barbara.Sabitzer@aau.at Abstract This paper deals with the discovery of mirror neurons, their most important features and the way they influence our social lives. It focuses on their impact on children and their behavior at school. This paper aims at teachers and students in the teachers’ program who hope to better understand their pupils by gaining some insight into the way mirror neurons work. In the early 1990s, mirror neurons were discovered by a group of scientists from the University of Parma in Italy, led by Giacomo Rizzolatti. Mirror neurons’ defining functional characteristic is that they are activated when a motor act is performed and also when it is witnessed. Mirror neurons enable us to understand, interpret and imitate observed actions and to predict their results. They inform us about other people’s mental and physical condition and can change our own by mirroring our counterpart’s [1]. From birth, mirror neurons enable children to communicate with their environment by imitating actions they witness. Although this is not an essential part of communication anymore when speech is acquired, mirror neurons allow us to keep imitating facial expressions, sentiments and postures subconsciously throughout life, thus facilitating interpersonal relationships [1]. Nevertheless, mirror neurons have so far received little attention in educational theory. As teaching always involves interpersonal dealings, however, they play an important role in relations between teachers and students and among students. This paper is supposed to raise awareness to the way mirror neurons work and their range of influence; thus contributing to an improvement of children’s learning environment and interpersonal communication at school. Keywords: mirror neurons, education theory, action understanding, intention understanding, learning by imitation, interpersonal relationships, brain-based teaching. 1 INTRODUCTION When paying attention to our surroundings, we can frequently observe different kinds of imitational behavior and resonance phenomena, such as two people yawning or changing their posture at the same time or children learning a new skill by watching their parents. The key to understanding this “mirroring” of other humans’ actions and behavior was found when mirror neurons, neurons firing both when an action is executed and when it is observed, were discovered by a group of scientists led by Giacomo Rizzolatti from the University of Parma in Italy. This paper’s aim is to give an overview of the way mirror neurons work and their sphere of influence, focusing on their impact on students’ imitational learning and interpersonal dealings at school. Thereby, mirror neurons’ influence on students’ performances and their relationships to teachers and peers are discussed. This paper’s first part addresses mirror neurons’ discovery in monkeys and humans, circumstances under which they are activated, and their still controversial contribution to speech development in humans. Secondly, several aspects of mirror neurons’ impact on social interaction are presented. They are believed to render action understanding and imitation, understanding of intentions and mirroring of other people’s body language possible. Following this, mirror neurons’ influence on students’ learning performances and relationships with their teachers and peers are discussed. As a last point, still controversial theories concerning mirror neurons’ influence on self-consciousness, the way mirror neurons are affected by negative emotions and the role mirror neurons play in mobbing are addressed. 2 MIRROR NEURONS In the early 1990s, Rizzolatti et al. noticed that specific neurons in a macaque monkey’s area 5 of the premotor cortex reacted when it reached for a nut and when it saw other scientists and animals reach for it [2]. Later on, some of the same neurons were found to react to the sound of paper being torn too, Proceedings of INTED2013 Conference 4th-6th March 2013, Valencia, Spain ISBN: 978-84-616-2661-8 0040