The answer? Mirrors Neurons. And what’s that, for God’s sake? I havent heard about it until last week, so it’s a new topic for me too. Anyway, according to scientists working with neuroscience, mirror neurons are activated when animals perform some action or when we watch someone performing an action.

And what are the virtual  worlds all about? You seeing your avatar performing some action or watching someone’s avatar doing something. Aren’t you still convinced? Read this blog’s text which turned up on my Google Reader last week:

In his book, I, Avatar, Mark Stephen Meadows, explains this in terms of our biology, the way we are hard-wired with “mirror neurons,”

It’s the actions and appearances of avatars that allow us to identify with them and gets the mirror neurons hot. They may be just pixels, but your brain responds as if they were human. Our wiring quickly bridges the gap between the real and fictional.

Source: Smarthistory Blog » Blog Archive » smARThistory looks at Art in Second Life: Alizarin Goldflake

Not satisfied yet? Read the text below, from the Joint Information Systems Committee, an institution focused on strategic guidance, advice and opportunities use to use ICT to support learning, teaching, research and administration, the Serious Virtual Worlds report about education and metaverse:

“In addition, other studies are showing how mirror neurons (premotor neurons) fire both when an animal acts and when an animal observes the action performed by another animal. In this way, the neuron mirrors the behaviour of the animal as though it were doing the action itself. Ramachandran considers this discovery as one of the most important in neuroscience and it may at least in part explain why simulation and imitation with an emphasis upon visual data are such powerful learning tools.”

Another article,The Secrets of Storytelling: Why We Love a Good Yarn, published by Scientific American is concerned with narrative and why this is important for human race, but also supports the idea relating viewing real people and cartoon performing actions:

“In support for the idea that stories act as practice for real life are imaging studies that reveal similar brain ac­tivity during viewings of real people and animated cha­racters.”

“So, next time you see you avatar doing something, remember it is all phantasy but your mind perceives it  as real ou almost…