When I want my son to smile, I just have to smile at him. When pretty girls smile at him, he’s already learnt to smile back at them… perhaps even more important than learning to smile at his father!
The same thing happens when we want him to open his mouth to eat – we open our mouth nice and wide, and he responds by opening his mouth. It’s like magic 
A few weeks back, I taught my son to blow raspberries. It’s a simple thing – you just stick your tongue out and blow, but he’s really mastered it now. Though he hasn’t yet figured out that he shouldn’t do it when he’s feeding…
I’m in Hangzhou assisting with the New Code Coaching training led by Dr John Grinder and Carmen Bostic St Clair, and one of the topics that just came up was ‘mirror neurons’ (or ‘镜神经元’). According to wikipedia, a mirror neuron is a neuron that fires both when an animal acts and when the animal observes the same action performed by another. Mirror neurons offer the neurological basis for rapport and explain why we can connect with people by mirroring their body language, gestures, words and rhythm.
Another website describes them this way:
“Mirror neurons are active when the monkeys perform certain tasks, but they also fire when the monkeys watch someone else perform the same specific task. There is evidence that a similar observation/action matching system exists in humans. The mirror system is sometimes considered to represent a primitive version, or possibly a precursor in phylogeny, of a simulation heuristic that might underlie mindreading.”
If you’re interested in how to build stronger connections with the people around you, you might want to check out how our brains are wired to help us learn from other people, just by watching them.
