and she says, The neuron? The neuron, and then she looked and did this.

Every neuron is different.

It has 20 different neuron types.

And it's a beautifully complex neuron.

And you can see that the green neuron touches the red neuron at two locations, and these are what are called synapses.

But this is just a single neuron.

And each neuron itself is largely unique.

And so when the green neuron wants to communicate, it wants to send a message to the red neuron, it spits out neurotransmitter.

Right? That's how the mirror neuron system works.

And a neuron, well, that's smaller than brain.

And we can do that for another neuron in green.

So, here's how it stacks up against an entire neuron.

So there is no neuron in my brain that is the same as another, and there is no neuron in my brain that is the same as in yours.

You take this DNA and you put it into a neuron.

The researchers introduced their invention on the Neuron published on August 3.

I edited out the last bit when I asked, Where is the neuron?

Because it's as though this neuron is adopting the other person's point of view.

In this diagram, every node is a neuron, and every line is a connection.

Now there is another kind of mirror neuron, which is involved in something quite different.

Each neuron is connected via synapses to up to 10,000 other neurons in your brain.

And each neuron makes something like 1,000 to 10,000 contacts with other neurons in the brain.

Right. There's a person at Newcastle who has figured out that it's a very large neuron.

And in fact you need one laptop to do all the calculations just for one neuron.

But the same neuron, in some cases, will fire when I simply watch another person being touched.

Let's zoom in on one synapse, and keep your eyes on the interior of the green neuron.

So we could show the firing rate of that neuron as a function of the animal's location.

The neuron uses its natural protein making machinery to fabricate these little light sensitive proteins and install them all over the cell, like putting solar panels on a roof, and the next thing you know, you have a neuron which can be activated with light.

If I reach out and pull an object, another neuron will fire, commanding me to pull that object.

Someday, a fleet of microscopes will capture every neuron and every synapse in a vast database of images.

So we're going to imagine we're recording from a single neuron in the hippocampus of this rat here.

And so, when you start to look at emergent systems, you can look at a neuron under a microscope.

One neuron can be connected to so many other neurons, because there can be synapses at these points of contact.

And she's actually figuring out how to make a collision avoidance circuitry based on this very large neuron in the locust.

So what we see is that this neuron knows whenever the rat has gone into one particular place in its environment.

In other words, if somebody touches me, my hand, neuron in the somatosensory cortex in the sensory region of the brain fires.

Okay, so there is a feedback signal that vetoes the signal of the mirror neuron preventing you from consciously experiencing that touch.

Just as one strand of spaghetti contacts many other strands on your plate, one neuron touches many other neurons through their entangled branches.

Whenever a flash of light hits the receptor, the pore opens, an electrical current is switched on, and the neuron fires electrical impulses.

For example, if I do that, and reach and grab an apple, a motor command neuron in the front of my brain will fire.

If we continue through the entire stack, we can reconstruct the three dimensional shape of a small fragment of a branch of a neuron.

Now, another idea, another way of multiplexing is multiplexing in space, having different parts of a neuron do different things at the same time.

So, here is a neuron that fires when I reach and grab something, but it also fires when I watch Joe reaching and grabbing something.

So there's a possibility that you have computational compartments that allow the different parts of the neuron to do different things at the same time.

And I claim that what happened was the sudden emergence of a sophisticated mirror neuron system, which allowed you to emulate and imitate other people's actions.

So here's two sort of canonical neurons from a vertebrate and an invertebrate, a human pyramidal neuron from Ramon y Cajal, and another cell to the right, a non spiking interneuron, and this is the work of Alan Watson and Malcolm Burrows many years ago, and Malcolm Burrows came up with a pretty interesting idea based on the fact that this neuron from a locust does not fire action potentials.