what the group reported was that some of the bring-food-to-mouth neurons would also activate if the monkey observed someone else (monkey or human) making that movement. ... Consistently, about 10 percent of the PMC neurons devoted to doing movement X also activated when observing someone else doing movement X—very odd for neurons a few steps away from commanding muscles to move. The neurons were concerned with the mirroring of movements. And thus were “mirror neurons” announced to the world.
Copy Machine
Imitation powers both learning and conformity.
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First, by simply watching. ... He simply absorbs visually the image in front of him. This image completely bypasses the ego-mind, and seems to be fed directly to the body, for in a few minutes the kid is on the floor doing movements very similar to those he was watching.
He called it the meme, and it became his most memorable invention, far more influential than his selfish genes or his later proselytizing against religiosity. “Memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation,” he wrote.
If, as seems to be the case everywhere, culture works by faithful imitation with a bias towards imitating prestigious individuals (in other words, copy the expert, not the parent or the person closest to hand), then all it would take for certain skills to be lost would be a handful of unlucky accidents in which the most prestigious individual had forgotten or mislearned a crucial step or even gone to his grave without teaching an apprentice.
In contrast, he wished to argue that such an imitation principle did apply to ‘thinking’ or ‘intelligence’. If a computer, on the basis of its written replies to questions, could not be distinguished from a human respondent, then ‘fair play’ would oblige one to say that it must be ‘thinking’. This being a philosophical paper, he produced an argument in favour of adopting the imitation principle as a criterion.
Systrom had told his communications team that he would acknowledge to the press that the Stories format was a Snapchat invention that Instagram had copied, and that was why they had the same name. ... All the major headlines used some version of the word “copy” in them. By not denying it, Systrom took the momentum out of the criticism. He explained that it was just a new form of communication, like email or text messaging, and that just because Snapchat invented it didn’t mean that other companies should avoid using the same opportunity.
Over time our laws, mores, and ethics have slowly expanded the sphere of human empathy. Generally, humans originally identified themselves primarily via their families. ... Gradually the circle of “us” enlarged from inside the family clan to inside the tribe, and then from tribe to nation.
The chief burden of the frustrated is the consciousness of a blemished, ineffectual self, and their chief desire is to slough off the unwanted self and begin a new life. They try to realize this desire either by finding a new identity or by blurring and camouflaging their individual distinctness; and both these ends are reached by imitation. ... As to the blurring and camouflaging of the self, it is achieved solely by imitation—by becoming as like others as possible. The desire to belong is partly a desire to lose oneself.