Did you ever watch someone accidentally slice their finger or get hit by a ball and you cried out in pain as if you felt exactly what they felt?

That is because certain cells in your brain are activated not only when you perform an action, but also when you watch someone else do it.

The senior scientist of an Italian team of researchers that discovered this phenomenon is now in Malta to speak about the implications of this mechanism on mental health.

But the renowned neuroscientist Giacomo Rizzolatti will not be talking about the psychological aspect of mental well-being. As a scientist, he will instead speak about how “mirror neurons” work biologically.

Although it might sound complicated, in essence it means that whenever someone observes an action being done by someone else, a set of neurons coded for that action (mirror neurons) is activated in the observer’s motor system.

I have no trick on how to be good

So the observer understands and feels what the other individual is doing without having to think about it.

Speaking to the Times of Malta before his public lecture today, Prof. Rizzolatti explained how this same mechanism was also present in emotional settings of empathy and thus had important social implications.

It could help us understand cruel behaviour against other human beings in cultural settings, which are otherwise difficult to understand, he said.

When we empathise with someone else, we consider them ‘like us’, and when a friend has his heart broken by a loved one, we can actually feel that pain.

But if culture destroyed, inhibited or diminished this mechanism, then we will not threat others as human beings, the neuroscientist said.

This natural empathic mechanism could be inhibited as happened through radio propaganda in Nazi Germany. Today’s propaganda tools could be online blogs and the social media.

On the other hand, culture could also improve this mechanism, such as through religious values of treating others as yourself, he noted.

So is this ‘mirror mechanism’ a solution to society’s individualism and cruelty?

“I have no trick on how to be good. I’m only saying there is a mechanism and this mechanism is flexible,” he said, adding that without any doubt, when he saw someone in pain, he did not only understand that they were in pain, but felt the pain physically.

“Many people ask me: so how can we improve society? Well that is not my business as a neuroscientist, but it’s up to politicians and sociologists, among others,” he said.

Prof. Rizzolatti, who last year received the Brain Prize by the Grete Lundbeck European Brain Research Prize Foundation in Copenhagen, will give a public talk today at 7pm at the Presidential Palace and a plenary lecture at the 9th Malta Medical School Conference tomorrow.

The public lecture is being organised by the Malta Neuroscience Network Programme in collaboration with The President’s Foundation for the Wellbeing of Society and Narrative Structures.

He was invited to Malta by Professor Giuseppe Di Giovanni, founder and coordinator of the Malta Neuroscience Network at the University of Malta.

The network, with the support of the university’s Research Innovation and Development Trust (RIDT) works at raising awareness about neuroscience, brain disorders and mental health.

Professor Di Giovanni can be contacted on giuseppe.digiovanni@um.edu.mt.