Mirror neurons allow you to put yourself in another person’s shoes. Your brain says, in effect, “The same neurons are firing as when I move my hand, so I know what he is feeling and what he is up to.” In addition, neurons we might loosely call “touch mirror neurons” fire when you are touched or watch someone else being touched. That humans have these abilities made intuitive sense to Charles Darwin, who noted that when you watch a javelin thrower about to release the spear, your leg muscles flinch unconsciously and that when a child watches his mother use a pair of scissors, he clenches and unclenches his jaws in uncontrollable mimicry. In this phenomenon we see an evolutionary prelude to the ability to imitate and emulate—the basis of cultural transmission of knowledge.