360 GRADI MAGAZINE January/February 2021

feeling.
The term mirror neurons
is simply a metaphor: we
have no mirrors in our
heads, there is no
reflective surface in
these neurons. The same
neuron that allows me to perform an
action is also activated when I see that
action performed by someone else;
somehow it implicitly establishes an
interaction without my having to
concentrate or think complicated
thoughts, it makes me recognize in that
movement something with which I
resonate: it is a take or put, a move, a
hold, a breaking, etc. First discovered in
apes, this mirroring mechanism is even
more extensive in humans; it is not
limited to actions with a purpose and we
can see it being activated when we
perform actions on objects,
communicative actions, but also
movements apparently devoid of any
purpose. If you now saw me raise my
arm while I raise my arm, there are
thousands of neurons in your motor
brain that are firing at the same time
even if your arm is still; you are
simulating or rather your neurons are
behaving like when
you lift your arm. An
even more
interesting fact is
that this also
happens when we
imagine performing an action while
remaining still; if you imagine carrying
two cartons, of six bottles each, of
mineral water to the seventh floor of a
building, going up step by step, at the
end of this imaginative activity if I
measure your blood pressure and heart
rate you will have an increase in values
blood pressure and heart rate; this
happens in a similar way to when we
see particularly engaging films. Below,
we can have a demonstration of the
extraordinary power that images have,
not only when they are in motion, but
also when they are still images.
Observing the incredibly expressive
details traits of the Lamentation over
the Dead Christ by Niccolò dell’Arca or
the Memory of a pain or Portrait of
Santina Negri by Giuseppe Pellizza da
Volpedo, despite being static images
anyone who looks at this gesture, this
hand, the way in which this hand grabs
the arm of the chair, it is not simply the
registration of a three-dimensional
object with a certain color, it is an
image that gives us a sense of
movement; this sense of movement, in
turn, transmits emotions and makes us
attached.
Daniel Stern,
unfortunately passed
away a few years ago,
was a famous American
psychiatrist, one of
those people who
revolutionized the way we look at
children and an important protagonist
of Infant Research. One of his bestknown
books is “The Interpersonal
World of the Child”, published in 1985.
“The vital forms. Dynamic experience in
psychology, art, psychotherapy and
development” is the title of the last
32 360 GRADI