[MD] Social level for humans only

[David Thomas]

All,

I caught a episode of Charlie Rose's special Brain Series last night titled
Social Brain. It's a roundtable discussion with researchers from a wide
variety of areas presenting and discussing their findings related to the
brain. A couple on interesting points bearing on this thread.

One was a genetics researcher studying tiny soil worms that eat bacteria.
The worms exhibit a behavior they just couldn't figure out. For some reason
on a regular basis the worms would clump up together in an knot and squirm
around each other. But not all worms, just most. By marking them it was
clear that they split into two groups. Those that regularly exhibited this
behavior and those that seldom or rarely did. They eliminated physical
characteristic, sex, food, disease, and every other thing they could think
of and finally were left with "it must in some way be social" They did
genetic testing a sure enough they found a difference in one gene that is
thought to have some relationship to social behavior in other species.

Then an Italian researcher studying similarities between monkey and human
brains found a similar area in both humans and monkeys that mirror each
other's activities. He thinks it help in reading the intentions of others
and learning social skills. Electrodes are tuned to single cell activities
in both a monkey and man. When one or the other makes a motion, moving an
apple to one's mouth, the cell firing in the one moving and the one watching
nearly simultaneously fire in nearly identical patterns. And it works both
ways man mirrors monkey, monkey mirrors man. He thinks this could also help
prepare children to speak. Baby watches, while brain is internally
mirroring, mother speaking. Eventual all this internal mimicking may set up
patterns for vocal and facial muscles to duplicate later.

Ve..rrrry interesting.

Dave