Mirror Neurons

“Mark!”

“Here.”

“Ashley!”

“Here.”

“Stephen!”

“Yo.”

Mrs. Gregory raised an eyebrow at Stephen, who was lounging back on his lab stool soaking in the suppressed giggles of his classmates. She went back to calling roll for her fourth period freshman biology class.

“David!”

“Here….”

“Samantha!”

She raised her head again when no one answered. She looked over at the table where Samantha usually sat.

“No Samantha today, huh?” she said, marking it off in her book. “Too bad…she’ll miss this wonderfully interesting lesson on neurons today!” She could hear someone—probably Stephen—groan in response.

Another girl raised her hand.

“Yes Rachel?” Mrs. Gregory said.

“Samantha will be back tomorrow,” Rachel said. She looked proud of being the only one with privileged information. “I’ll get her homework for her.”

“Know why?” Mrs. Gregory asked as she made the appropriate notes in her roll book.

Rachel shook her head.

“Her mom called and left a message. That’s all I know.”

“All right. I guess we’ll hear all about her trip to Hawaii when she gets back.” A few more giggles sounded from the table of girls in the corner. She knew her class got a kick out of her humor, and she didn’t mind using it if it helped them connect on some level. Understanding her freshmen could be difficult sometimes. She watched as Stephen pretended to fall off his chair, to the delight of the same table of girls. Or difficult at all times, in the cases of some, she thought. She could never be sure she was getting through to everybody.

One of the guys in the front waved his hand at Mrs. Gregory. She called on him.

“I know where she is,” Brett said. “A kid in my last class said that her grandfather died, and she’s going to his funeral.”

“Oh!” Mrs. Gregory said, flushing at the thought of her insensitive joke. A quiet murmur ran around the class. “That’s terrible. That was a horrible thing for me to say.” A few kids who had laughed also looked at the floor guiltily. Attempting to move on, Mrs. Gregory finished taking roll quickly, then looked around the room.

“Now,” she said. “I wasn’t kidding when I said we had to talk about neurons today. One of your state standards, you know! Notebooks out!”

She waited until the general noises of backpacks opening and pages turning grew softer, then turned to write on the whiteboard behind her.

“So,” she said. “You’ve got somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred billion of them. Anybody know what neurons are?” She pointed to the word in her bold print on the board and glanced around at the blank faces staring back at her. Kimmie was the only one with her hand raised. Mrs. Gregory sighed.

“Anyone besides Kimmie?” The class stayed silent and immoveable. “All right, Kimmie, go ahead.”

“They’re basically nerve cells, right?” Kimmie answered.

“Right.” Mrs. Gregory pointed to the quick diagram she had drawn on the board. “This is the basic structure of a neuron. See these parts?” She began labeling. “Here’s the cell body…the axon…the synapse…the myelin sheath….”

She paused as the class tilted their heads down toward their papers and scratched away with their dull pencils. Even Stephen was writing. As they looked at her drawing and tried to sketch a reasonable copy of it, she continued lecturing on the functions of the parts.

When most of the class had looked back up to listen to the extended lecture on neuron parts, Mrs. Gregory wrote more on the board. “Copy these down—these are the three types of neurons you need to know: sensory neurons, motor neurons, and interneurons.” She watched as pencils hit paper again.

“These three types control different things,” she continued. “The sensory neurons control what you sense of the outside world. When you touch a hot stove and realize it’s burning you? That would be the sensory neurons doing their job.” She wrote “5 Senses” next to the line containing the sensory neurons.

“Then, the motor neurons.” She wrote on the board again. “They send the messages from your brain to your muscles to make you move.”

Kimmie raised her hand.

“Yes, Kimmie?”

“That’s what gets affected with stuff like ALS, right?”

“Yes, that’s right,” Mrs. Gregory said, glad to see that someone in her class was interested in the subject, albeit a bit morbidly. “Muscular disorders like ALS often have to do with these neurons.”

Another girl raised her hand.

“Something to add, Maddie?”

“My dad had ALS,” she said. “By the end, he couldn’t even move anything. All he could do was blink at us.”

“I’m so sorry about that,” Mrs. Gregory said, recoiling at the tough reality. But Maddie didn’t seem shaken about it.

“It was a long time ago,” the girl continued. “But I remember what happened.”

“Of course,” Mrs. Gregory said. “And you’re right, when the motor neurons stop firing, nothing moves.” Though she wanted to sympathize with Maddie, Maddie didn’t seem to want sympathy from her.

“So moving on to the third one,” she continued, writing once more on the board. “The interneurons, or associational neurons, help connect everything together, basically. They link the sensory and motor neurons. That’s all you’ll need to know for your standardized testing. But since I’m your teacher, and it’s my job to teach you, we’re not going to stop there.” She capped her smelly whiteboard marker and watched as half the class dropped their pencils in relief.

“So these interneurons are pretty interesting ones, actually,” Mrs. Gregory said. “Anybody know the new ones they’ve found?” She wasn’t surprised that even Kimmie didn’t raise her hand. What freshman would spend their free time reading the latest neurobiological research?

She went on. “Well, scientists have got some pretty cool technology now, and they tested monkeys and found—”

“They what?!” screeched a girl named Shawna in the back. The class burst out laughing.

“They were testing monkeys, and—”

“How could they do that?” Shawna asked, looking disgusted. Mrs. Gregory mentally berated herself for forgetting Shawna’s deep personal attachment to the cause of animal rights.

“Shawna,” Mrs. Gregory said, trying hard to be patient. “Feel free to do a presentation on that once we get to the biology and ethics unit. This is just what happened. Scientists do test monkeys, whether you like it or not, and in this particular case, no monkeys were harmed in the conducting of this experiment. So, these scientists were testing monkeys….” She waited until she was sure Shawna had conceded for the moment, then continued.

“And they found this neuron they thought was a motor neuron—every time the monkey grabbed a peanut, they recorded the neuron firing in its brain. Controlled the motion, right? Well, one day, the monkey was watching as one of the researchers walked in and picked up a peanut, and lo and behold, the same neuron fired! It wasn’t just a motor neuron—this was an interneuron, which they’ve termed a ‘mirror neuron.’” She paused in her lecture and was somehow not surprised to see Stephen perched on his stool like a monkey, scratching his head bizarrely.

“Actually Stephen,” she said. “You’ve given me the perfect example.”

Stephen dropped back down on his chair and smiled. If only he could produce such good results on his tests, Mrs. Gregory thought as she went on.

“These neurons have a lot to do with how we learn and copy others’ examples. Now, hopefully you all will be able to learn this material and remember it with the help of your mirror neurons. We see others’ actions, and something in us responds, as if we too are doing the same thing. Some people call them the ‘monkey see, monkey do’ neurons, in fact.” She gestured to Stephen, who took a bow. “Evidently it goes both ways—perhaps we should call them the ‘Stephen sees, Stephen does’ neurons.” Stephen and a few students laughed; they were definitely getting more interested.

“Scientists haven’t found these specific neurons in human brains yet,” she continued. “But they have noticed that a similar region of the brain fires in similar situations. They think that these neurons have something to do with seeing others’ actions and feeling like we’re going through the same thing. Now,” she finished. “To bring it back to real life for you guys, do you know what empathizing is?”

Kimmie’s hand shot up first, but Stephen’s quickly followed.

“Stephen?” said Mrs. Gregory, surprised.

“It’s like when you know what someone else is going through and you feel that way with them. Like you were saying, only about feelings.”

“Not bad, Stephen,” Mrs. Gregory said, still in shock. Honestly, this boy. One minute, behaving like a monkey; the next, revealing that he actually had some human sensitivity.

“So they think that these mirror neurons help you do that—empathize with people,” she continued. “Which of course just shows the function of neurons in general: they let you connect with the world and other people around us.”

Glancing at the clock to make sure she had time, she turned back to the board and began pointing with her marker.

“The sensory neurons give us information about the outside world. The motor neurons let us move in it. The interneurons connect those things and also help us in other ways, as we see with the mirror neurons, which are one example. Got it?” She watched as about five heads nodded and the rest darted under the tables to snatch up their bags.

“Don’t forget!” she called over the clanging of the bell, the scuffle of paper, and the quick zipping of backpacks. “Test tomorrow on this week’s notes! All about the nervous system!”

She watched Kimmie scurrying out, followed by the rest of the class. Stephen slouched out after everyone else, waving good-bye.

Mrs. Gregory waved back. What a day. Neurons were always one of her favorite lecture topics in the physiology unit, but this class was particularly entertaining. Especially Stephen.

Returning to her desk, she glanced back down at her roll book to flip the page to fifth period and noticed her scribblings by Samantha’s name. Poor girl. There was a situation with which she could empathize. Coming back to school the next day would probably be pretty hard, Mrs. Gregory thought. She’d try to be extra-sensitive and, she thought dryly, not mention anything about Hawaii.

#

The next day, Mrs. Gregory took roll quickly after the bell rang so the kids would have plenty of time for their test.

“Good to see you back, Samantha,” she said, smiling at her kindly as she ran past her name in the list. “I’m sorry about your grandfather.” Samantha smiled and nodded back, but Mrs. Gregory could tell it was forced.

“Okay, kids,” she said, putting the book down and picking up the stack of stapled packets and Scantrons sitting on the corner of her desk. “Everything away except for a number two pencil and an eraser! Use your test packet as a coversheet for your answers, and don’t write on it! That means you, Stephen!” She grinned pointedly at him, and he grinned right back. Stephen liked to draw all over the test questions when he was done taking a test.

“Good luck—do your best!” she said, handing questions and Scantrons to the first table and making her way around the room.

“Oh, Samantha, I forgot,” she said, when she approached her table. “You can make this up Monday if you want to, since you missed the lecture yesterday.” Samantha nodded blankly. Mrs. Gregory struggled with what to do. She felt like she was failing to help Samantha feel better. Of course, she thought, what would make her feel better? Certainly not taking a test, or even taking it on Monday. She finished passing out tests to the rest of the students at Samantha’s table, including Stephen, who sat across from her.

“Here, Samantha, you can copy the lecture notes from yesterday,” Mrs. Gregory said, retrieving her own copy from her desk and pointing Samantha to the resource room across the hall. “We don’t want you sneaking answers now!” She was gratified by Samantha’s small smile, but her heart still felt heavy as she watched Samantha walk out with her notebook.

She sat back down to write out notes for the coming week. Every now and then a student would come up and place his or her test in the drop basket at the front of her desk. The clock ticked away, and by ten minutes to the end of the period, most of the students were reading books, lying on their arms, or bobbing their heads to hidden iPods. Mrs. Gregory looked around more closely. Only Stephen still had a test out. She watched him for signs of sketching, but it didn’t look like he was drawing.

Samantha came back in a few minutes later. The lecture notes hadn’t been long, but Mrs. Gregory could see traces of tears on her face, though Samantha’s eyes were dry when she handed the notes back and thanked her in a quiet voice.

Stephen finally came up to the desk and put his test in the basket. Mrs. Gregory caught his eye as he turned to go back to his seat, and he gave her the thumbs-up sign. Maybe I am connecting with him, she thought. Somebody’s mirror neurons are working, anyway.

As Stephen sat down, she stood up.

“All right, class,” she said, and the whole room collectively exhaled. She gathered the tests out of the basket. “You can talk for the last few minutes.”

Pandemonium erupted as she heard conversations spring up. In the back, she heard girls talking about their winter formal plans, while the front table was discussing the latest basketball statistics. She looked over the room and was astonished to see Stephen in conversation with Samantha. She couldn’t hear them over the more animated conversations, but she watched as Stephen gestured with his hands to himself and kept talking earnestly. Samantha listened intently.

The bell rang loudly, and the usual dash for the door ensued. Once again, Stephen loitered behind, but today Samantha stayed back with him. They didn’t look at Mrs. Gregory as they left, but she could hear snatches of their conversation as they made their way out the door into the hallway.

“…really, I do,” Stephen finished.

“Thanks for talking to me and everything.”

“No problem, I remember how it was when my grandpa died. I came….”

Their voices died out in the hallway rush, and Mrs. Gregory turned her head and stared at the stack of tests on her desk. Stephen’s sat on top. Something told her that he had finally gotten an A.