When I was in the military I used to spend a lot of time in transit, waiting in airports or bus stations when I was going home on leave or moving from one duty station to another. In such places there are waves of people that move through in correlation to the various train, plane, or bus schedules and some of those people are very interesting. I developed a curiosity about people and started observing them; maybe that is one reason I also became a psychologist.

At times I have been rather bold about my people-watching. For instance, once, while travelling back from Australia to North Carolina, I found myself walking through the security check-point of the Los Angeles airport, on the way to my gate. Just up ahead of me I noticed Muhammad Ali, and so I followed him and sat down on a seat directly across from him, about six or seven feet away. I watched him for about an hour and a half as person after person came up to him for autographs or to take pictures. At one point, when he?d seen me watching him, he looked into my eyes and gave me a kind of wink.

Did you know that we are hard wired to observe? We are most sensitive to the observation of other people, but even the movements of animals have meaning to us because we have been designed with the capacity to imitate and understand experience by observing. Our nervous system has been created with specialised neurons whose only purpose is to observe. This has nothing to do with men being more visual than women, or anything like that. At this level men and women both really need to be able to observe. It is a basic necessity of life, and these specialised neurons are called ?mirror? neurons.

Now, let?s see if I can describe how they work. We could easily descend into the tall grass of technical language here, and that might be like trying to read Martian.

It starts when we are babies. At that point the brain is still growing, still shaping, still wrapping itself around whatever environment the infant inhabits. As the baby starts to reach out and touch, in the very act of doing so, the baby experiences simple eye-to-hand-to-mouth relationships. Those perceptual-motor actions construct the brain?s topography of the world ? that is, the person?s basic reality about being in the world and navigating that space. Are you following?

Now, right next to the motor neurons that have learned how to do various actions in response to various perceptions in this rudimentary exploring process reside the mirror neurons. Their job is to observe actions, and when a mirror neuron ?sees? or ?hears? something related to the action most associated with its neighbouring motor neuron, it fires off. In essence, it begins to sing its song.

Meanwhile, down the spinal cord there can be a process of inhibiting that prevents the automatic imitation of what is observed. Without this, we might be enslaved to mimic what we see others doing. This inhibiting action is also connected to the mirror-neuron system. When this takes place, the brain does not direct imitating behaviour, it directs understanding behaviour. We start to make sense out of what we see.

One application in considering the mirror-neuron system is in the parenting of new babies. Aside from the basics of feeding, keeping warm, and making safe, parents can start at a very early stage to stimulate the physical activity of their babies.

This is not the same thing as standing them up to make them walk before they are able; this is providing them with safe but stimulating objects they can reach for and play with.

They will put their mouths on everything, but so be it; just make sure it?s something safe. It would also be a good idea to lay down on the floor and crawl around with them, to interact with them by imitating them, being at their level and not just ?talking baby talk? but making baby play. All that will provide perceptual-motor experience that will later provide a sense of place and reality as that person observes and interprets their grown-up world.Dr. Philip Brownell, M.Div., Psy.D., is a psychologist at Ashton Associates. Send e-mails to crossroadsg-gej.org