A number of years ago I started attending a martial arts class taught by Gregory Yau, a Shaolin master. The martial arts can be viewed as effective combat systems, sophisticated meditative disciplines, or as an integration of both approaches. Greg taught a style of gung-fu, a generic term for acquired skill, based upon techniques developed at the Shaolin Temple in China that date back to the sixth century. His focus was upon the spiritual dimensions. My intention was to observe the details of the body movements to understand how slight changes in the movement pattern altered the effectiveness of the training. I was in effect a "scientific observer" once a week of the practices and the training videos that Greg played and gave me. However, I was in for a surprise. My physical strength and well being were being enhanced by merely observing. When Greg and his students tested my grounding it was as solid as theirs and blows to my arm were painless to me but hurt the "attacker." This greatly surprised the young students since I was in my 70s and essentially not doing the practices. A side effect was that a skipping heart beat that had existed for decades disappeared.

I was never able to satisfactorily explain what was happening. However, recent research on a "mirror" mechanism built into our brain has shed some light on the effects that I was experiencing. There has been discovered a class of neurons in the brain called "mirror neurons" that have the amazing ability to transmit electrical impulses not only during the execution of a particular action, but also during observation of the equivalent action being carried out by someone else. Neuron activity in the brain has been found to mirror not only movements but also intentions, sensations, and emotions of those around us. For example, you are watching a movie and on the screen you see a tarantula moving across the pillow towards a man in bed. If you get the creeps as you watch the tarantula crawl up the man's arm, it's because the scene activates the same neurons that would be responding if the tarantula were crawling up your arm -- your brain translates what you are observing into sensations.

Neuroscientists have documented this type of brain mirroring first in monkeys and later in humans. Researchers have used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and other techniques to investigate brain mirroring and have identified mirror-like activity in several regions of the human brain. The research findings also suggest that the mirror neurons encode particular observed actions in context-dependent ways -- in effect the brain's mirroring allows one to understand another's intentions -- for example, are you moving your arm to get food to eat or to get a non-food object?