In 2004, Steve Jobs, CEO, chairman, and co-founder of Apple, was strolling along Madison Avenue in New York City when he noticed something strange, and gratifying. Hip white earphones (remember, back then most earphones came in basic boring black). Looping and snaking out of people’s ears, dangling down across their chests, peeking out of pockets and purses and backpacks. They were everywhere. “It was, like, on every block, there was someone with white headphones, and I thought, ‘Oh, my God, it’s starting to happen,’ ” Jobs, who’d recently launched his company’s immensely successful iPod, was quoted as saying.
2004年，苹果公司(Apple)的首席执行官、主席兼创始人史蒂夫·乔布斯(Steve Jobs)在纽约城的麦迪逊大街(Madison Avenue)上散步时，发现了一个奇怪的但令他欣慰的现象——全白色的耳机（要知道，在此之前几乎所有的耳机都是沉闷的黑色）绕在人们的脖子上、塞在耳朵里、挂在胸前；或者时不时地从人们的衣服口袋、手提包或是背包里露出来，无处不在。乔布斯说：“在每一个街区，我都会看到一些人戴着白色耳机，然后我就想‘天哪，白色耳机的时代到来了’。” 不久之前，乔布斯刚刚发布了苹果公司极其成功的产品——iPod。
You could term the popularity of the iPod (and its ubiquitous, iconic white headphones) a fad. Some might even call it a revolution. But from a neuroscientific point of view, what Jobs was seeing was nothing less than the triumph of a region of our brains associated with something called the mirror neuron.
你可以将iPod的流行（以及无处不在的、标志性的白色耳机）看作是一种时尚。有些人甚至称其为一次革命。但是从神经科学的观点来看，乔布斯所看到的，其实是我们的大脑中连接“镜像神经元”(mirror neuron)的区域发挥了作用。
In 1992, an Italian scientist named Giacomo Rizzolatti and his research team in Parma, Italy, were studying the brains of a species of monkey—the macaque—in the hopes of finding out how the brain organizes motor behaviors. Specifically, they were looking at a region of the macaque brain known by neuroscientists as F5, or the premotor area, which registers activity when monkeys carry out certain gestures, like picking up a nut. Interestingly, they observed that the macaques’ premotor neurons would light up not just when the monkeys reached for that nut, but also when they saw other monkeys reaching for a nut—which came as a surprise to Rizzolatti’s team, since neurons in premotor regions of the brain typically don’t respond to visual stimulation.
1992年，一名叫作贾科莫-里佐拉蒂(GiacomoRizzolatti)的意大利科学家以及他在帕尔玛的研究小组对一个猴子物种——短尾猿的大脑进行了研究——旨在发现大脑是如何组织运动行为的。具体来讲，他们研究了短尾猿大脑中的“F5区域”，也叫作“运动前区”(premotor area)，该区域负责记录短尾猿所执行的某一活动，例如“捡起一粒坚果”。有趣的是，研究人员发现，在短尾猿捡到坚果时，它们大脑中的运动前区会产生活动；而在看到其他短尾猿捡到坚果时，这个区域同样也会活动——这对里佐拉蒂研究小组来说是一个惊奇的发现，因为在通常情况下，大脑运动前区的神经元不会对视觉刺激产生反应。
On one particularly hot summer afternoon, Rizzolatti and his team observed the strangest thing of all when one of Dr. Rizzolatti’s grad students returned to the lab after lunch holding an ice cream cone, and noticed that the macaque was staring at him, almost longingly. And as the grad student raised the cone to his mouth and took a tentative lick, the electronic monitor hooked up to the macaque’s premotor region fired—bripp, bripp, bripp.
在一个炎热的午后，里佐拉蒂和他的小组观察到了一个最奇怪的现象：里佐拉蒂博士的一名学生在午饭后拿着一个蛋卷冰激淋回到实验室，他发现短尾猿正用渴望的眼神凝视着他。而当这名学生拿起冰激淋并伸出舌头舔了一口时，连接短尾猿运动前区的电子监控器突然发出了“哔哔哔”的响声。
The monkey hadn’t done a thing. It hadn’t moved its arm or taken a lick of ice cream; it wasn’t even holding anything at all. But simply by observing the student bringing the ice cream cone to his mouth, the monkey’s brain had mentally imitated the very same gesture.
短尾猿并没有任何举动。它既没有移动手臂也没有伸过头来舔冰激淋；甚至它手里什么都没有拿。但是，仅仅是看着那名学生把冰激淋送到嘴里，短尾猿的大脑就模仿了相同的动作。
This amazing phenomenon was what Rizzolatti would eventually dub “mirror neurons” at work—neurons that fire when an action is being performed and when that same action is being observed. “It took us several years to believe what we were seeing,” he later said.
最终，里佐拉蒂将这一惊人的现象称为“镜像神经元”的作用——当某一行为被执行、并且同样的行为被监测到时，该神经元便会被激活。里佐拉蒂后来说：“我们花了好几年的时间去相信我们发现的这一现象。”
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