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movements increase activity within the motor system measured using fMRI. Furthermore, it is possible to show that the same parts of the motor system can be active in talking and in understanding speech. By analyzing which parts of the brain are active and when they become active, it is possible to show that when motor system activity in the frontal lobe of the brain precedes activity in other regions (e.g., the temporal lobe), listeners have a better understanding.6 It is as if the motor system “recognizes” the speech before other parts of the brain when the talking mouth is visible to the listener.

This study shows that more information about the action of producing speech (visible mouth movements) can activate the motor areas of the brain during understanding of speech. But it is also the case that understanding speech without seeing the speaker depends on the motor system. Hockey players are experts at hitting slap shots, blocking passes, and whacking each other in the head with hockey sticks. They have done these things in the real world just as monkeys in Parma have learned to reach for certain objects. When hockey players listen to sentences describing hockey action, even without seeing the speaker or the action, motor areas are active during sentence understanding and these same motor areas are not active in people without hockey experience.7 Understanding described actions appears to be influenced by the motor systems of people who have experience with those actions. Understanding action may be influenced by the experiences of our motor systems.

Reading minds through action

In understanding other people, we start with what we understand about ourselves. As Nick Epley describes in his chapter, we take this kind of egocentric perspective in understanding other people or pets or God or the behavior of inanimate objects. We know what we meant when we say something or do something and we make the same attribution to others, even nonhuman others. While this may be a good starting point for religions to help people feel connected to God, as discussed by Clark Gilpin, it may not be uniformly informative about human behavior. Behavior is not transparent for the intention of that behavior. The fact that any particular action is not necessarily unique to the intent behind it is the basis of a great deal of misunderstanding in daily interactions. As a result, even if mirror neurons help our brains recognize actions and sometimes interpret them, there are real limits to how experience-producing actions can correctly inform social understanding.

In spite of this limitation, we may often do just this—assume we understand another’s actions because of what we would intend were we to do the same thing in the same circumstance. Human social understanding does suffer egocentric limitations often and to the extent that it does, something like a mirror neuron system may play a role. For example, as discussed by Jean Decety in his chapter, our ability to understand the pain of others may derive in part from the neural systems involved in our experience of pain, but goes beyond this starting point. The social brain is on one level perhaps a very egocentric brain. But the fundamental motivation to connect with others has resulted in systems built on top of these egocentric foundations. If social

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