The Squares on the Board

Recently I’ve been thinking about how people make decisions (I’m usually thinking about this, on some level or another). Sometime in the last few weeks, I heard about “mirror neurons,” which basically, as I understand them, “fire” as if you were doing the same activity you observe someone else doing. So when we’re babies, we use these to learn how to perform increasingly advanced tasks, and when we’re more cognitively-developed, we can use these to empathize with others, “feeling” their pain, understanding what they’re going through, etc.

Now, I think that biology offers us some of the most powerful metaphors for other aspects of our lives (partly on the theory that, being embodied, all of our experiences come through bodies, so we can only analogize from those experiences, whether we like it or not). So I got to wondering, to what extent do we have emotional, spiritual, or ethical “mirror neurons?”