According to a very interesting article by John Colapinto in this week's New Yorker, "In the mid-nineties, [Dr. Vilayanur S.] Ramachandran [director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at U.C. San Diego] read a paper by Italian researchers who had discovered that a set of neurons in the frontal lobes of monkeys fired not only when the monkeys reached for an object but also when they observed another monkey performing the same action. Ramachandran wondered if these so-called 'mirror neurons' also exist in humans."

Research has shown that deliberate movements in humans suppress a kind of brain activity in the motor cortex called mu waves. Tests by Dr. Ramachandran have shown that subjects merely witnessing an action in others caused mu-wave suppression as well, evidence that mirror neurons exist in humans, too. Other researchers have since confirmed that people have several systems of mirror neurons which perform various functions.

As Dr. Ramachandran explains, the mirror-neuron experiments show that the brain is a dynamic system, not only interacting with your own sets of sense receptors but also those of others. Dr. Ramachandran takes it further, stating that in a sense, our brains are all hooked up to each other's. The only thing separating me from you and from all others is a thin membrane of skin. Dr. Ramachandran has dubbed mirror neurons "Gandhi neurons' because "they're dissolving the barrier between you and me."

This discovery offers insight into the nature of empathy. When one monkey watches another reach for a banana, the mirror neurons fire, and if the observed monkey's hand were to be, say, bitten by a snake, the mirror neurons in the observer's brain would fire as if the observer himself had been bit. The monkeys watching this incident all shriek in shock. This phenomenon explains the unpleasant feeling we have when we see someone else get injured or watch violent behavior, and suggests that the cause of sociopathic behavior may be a lack of functioning mirror neurons.

But Dr. Ramachandran takes it further. "One of the theories we put forward," he said, "is that the mirror-neuron system is used for modelling someone else's behavior, putting yourself in another person's shoes, looking at the world from another person's point of view. This is called an allocentric view of the world, as opposed to the egocentric view. So I made the suggestion that at some point in evolution this system turned back and allowed you to create an allocentric view of yourself. This is," he claims, "the dawn of self-awareness," or consciousness.

So consciousness, in this view, is not merely the ability to think - all sentient beings think to some extent or another - but to create a model in our minds of a "self" operating in the "external" world. In this theory, then, consciousness arises out of the fundamental sense of separation between self and other, and in turn further reinforces this sense of separation. That this is essentially an allocentric view of the self does not negate egocentricity, it only deepens our perception that the ego-self is a "thing" not unlike those external "things" upon which we base our mental models.

Dr. Ramachandran's theory is not inconsistent with the Buddha's teaching. In Buddhism, consciousness is sometimes depicted as a monkey in a tree full of fruit, grasping first for this and then for that and then still another thing, and so on. With consciousness, the world is continuously being divided into this, that and the other, but most especially into "self" and "not-self."

The concept of separation between self and other is considered in Buddhist teachings to be an aspect of ignorance (other aspects of ignorance include failure to recognize the existence of suffering or the impermanence of all things, but these other aspects are not relevant for our purposes now). In our ignorance, believing self and other to be separate, we create mental models of that "self" operating in an "external" world in order to satisfy our intentions. The Buddha called this "disposition of the mind," and taught that consciousness arose from this disposition.

Thus, we have the first three links in the 12-Fold Chain of Dependent Origination - ignorance giving rise to intention, and intention giving rise to consciousness, a process that ultimately leads to old age, sickness and death ("you" don't die until after you conceive of a "self" to die in the first place). This is a difficult and challenging teaching to understand, but Dr. Ramachandran's research and theory provide us with a new and intellectually accessible way of looking at it.