Imagine the clouds dripping.Dig a hole in your garden to put them in.

"Within some of these regions, there is a special class of nerve cells called mirror neurons. These neurons fire not only when you perform an action, but also when you watch someone else perform the same action. This sounds so simple that its huge implications are easy to miss. What these cells do is effectively allow you to empathize with the other person and "read"
 her intentions - figure out what she is really up to. You do this by running a simulation of her actions using your own body image.

When you watch someone else reach for a glass of water, for example, your mirror neurons automatically simulate the same action in your (usually subconscious) imagination. Your neurons will often go a step further and have you perform the action they anticipate the other person is about to take - say, to lift the water to her lips and take a drink. Thus you automatically form an assumption about her intentions and motivations - in this case that she is thirsty and is taking steps to quench that thirst. Now, you could be wrong in this assumption - she might intend to use the water to douse a fire or to fling in the face of a boorish suitor - but usually your mirror neurons are reasonably accurate guessers of others' intentions. As such, they are the closest thing to telepathy that nature was able to endow us with.

These abilities (and the underlying mirror-neuron circuitry) are also seen in apes, but only in humans do they seem to have developed to the point of being able to model aspects of others' minds rather than merely their actions. Inevitably this would have required the development of additional connections to allow a more sophisticated deployment of such circuits in complex social situations...it is difficult to overstate the importance of understanding mirror neurons and their function. They may well be central to social learning, imitation, and the cultural transmission of skills and attitudes - perhaps even of the pressed-together sound clusters we call 'words'. By hyper-developing the mirror-neuron system, evolution in effect turned culture into the new genome. Armed with culture, humans could adapt to hostile new environments and figure out how to exploit formerly inaccessible or poisonous food sources in just one or two generations - instead of the hundreds or thousands of generations such adaptations would have taken to accomplish through genetic evolution.

Thus culture became a significant new source of evolutionary pressure, which helped select for brains that had even better mirror-neuron systems and the imitative learning associated with them. The result was one of the many self-amplifying snowball effects that culminated in Homo Sapiens, the ape that looked into its own mind and saw the whole cosmos reflected inside."

very excited to be reading about the brain even though i struggle with remembering the names of all the parts! what sparked the great leap forward in the minds of the neanderthals to what we homo sapiens have today - unlike any other creature on our planet? won't even bother copying the introduction to the brain terminology bits because i'll probably take an hour just typing and double checking the spelling from the ebook