Scientists, for some reason, never seem to rise to the top -- or even very far from the bottom -- of our society's list of role models. Which is odd, because what could be more exciting than trying to answer the really big questions? Today I read something about research coming from an Italian neuroscientist -- Giacomo Rizzolatti of the University of Parma -- that gave me a bad case of white-coat envy. (Rizzolatti's on-line faculty profile includes links to some of his work.)

This work by Rizzolatti and his colleagues provides new insight into special brain cells, called "mirror cells", that seem to play a critical role in how we learn new things, how we come to experience feelings of empathy, disgust, shame, embarrassment, and lust, even why we enjoy novels, scary movies, and video games. (At last, a scientific reason for the success of "Fear Factor".)

As New York Times reporter Sandra Blakeslee wrote in her Jan. 10 article, "Cells That Read Minds," these new insights are changing the way scholars see the connection between culture and biology.

Mirror cells were first observed in the brains of monkeys in 1996. Since then, Rizzolatti and many others have worked to discover that humans have far more of them, organized into multiple systems that specialize in understanding not just the observed actions of others, but their intentions, the social meaning of their actions, and their emotions.

Simply put, these neurons "fire" in our brains in response to what we see, hear and observe, as if we were ourselves carrying out or experiencing what we are observing. So, when we watch a tennis player hit an overhead lob, mirror neurons in our brains react just as if we were hitting the shot. When we see someone trip and fall, mirror neurons in our brains react as if we were the ones tumbling to the ground.

This makes it clearer than ever that when we learn new things, we learn them not just, or even primarily, through conceptual thinking -- but through feeling. The implications for our understanding of how children learn and grow into effective social beings are huge.

Some scientists now believe, for instance, that autistic disorders, which are characterized by failure or difficulty in recognizing social cues, may be due in part to broken mirror neurons.

The growing understanding of our "mirror brains" also seems to support the idea that, for instance, a child who watches a lot of violence on screen and plays violent video games becomes more likely to act violently. That "hands-on" learning experiences will often be more powerful than pen-and-paper exercises. That there is as much nurture as nature in the phenomenon of "inherited" talent (think the Barrymores and acting, the Simms and throwing footballs).