[Buddha-l] Mirror neurons, anyone?

[S.A. Feite]

 From my notes while reading Dr. Siegel's book:

In his recent work _The Mindful Brain: Reflection and Attunement in  
the Cultivation of Well-Being_, psychiatrist and attachment disorder  
expert Dan Siegel talks a good bit about how mindfulness meditation is  
a form of inner attunement, attuning attention to our own intention.  
"An intention to pay attention to the intention to be mindful." This  
resonant state is important in social interactions, as attunement is  
also important to "get" how to attune to others. Some people don't  
have the ability to attune to others. A piece of our neurobiology may  
be the culprit: mirror neurons and resonance circuitry.

Mirror neurons and the mirror neuron system are neurons that not only  
fire when you enact a certain intention, they also fire when you watch  
or attune to someone enacting the same action! From the study of  
mirror neurons it appears this part of the brain is what's responsible  
for the natural ability to create representations of others minds.  
"Mirror neurons demonstrate the profoundly social nature of our brains."

What happens when you cannot do this? *You cannot take the position of  
the other*. You cannot experience empathy. There are probably a host  
of psychiatric disorders that emerge from this genetic or  
environmentally caused deficit.

A solution may be to learn to attune within through specific forms of  
meditation which enhance our "resonance circuitry" and basically  
exercise the atrophied parts of our nervous systems, like a muscle  
undergoing weight-training.

It also raises an interesting question: what is it about certain  
meditation techniques that they do not cultivate this ability to  
repair attunement? Is it because of an institutional deficit, i.e.  
environmentally cued or is it part of the meditation technique itself  
(or both)? Are all meditation techniques created equal? Are some  
meditation methods ultimately egocentric and others allocentric?

Steve Feite