Day 9- Science of mirror neurons

Foreign aloha, sensory heroes. We are on day nine trying to figure that out with my fingers and we are going to talk a little bit about. I'm just going to introduce you to the concept of mirror neurons. And it's just been a fascinating area that it's really been studied for 20 years. They started studying it on monkeys. I guess maybe that's where monkey see, monkey do comes from, I don't know. But anyway, I just wanted to share a little bit about this so that you can think about it in why it's so important to be able to keep your own self regulated when your child's becoming dysregulated. So just a little bit of summary of mirror neurons. Basically they have found that we have these neurons in our body that, that basically help us learn. So we, we observe and we copy, right? And you can see that with any, any little baby, even a little infant, you might go, and then they'll start moving their mouth like that, right? So it has a huge impact on imitation and learning. That allows us to imitate others actions and then we develop skills through observation. It also helps us learn empathy and emotional understanding. Helps us resonate with other people's emotions, fostering empathetic behavior and emotional connections. It also helps us with social interaction and communication. Mirror neurons enhance our ability to interpret body language gestures supporting nonverbal communication, which is most of our communication, right? And social interactions. And it helps us with motor planning and coordination. It assists us in mentally stimulating and planning our actions so we, we know in our mind what we're going to be doing. And then that influences our physical coordination and problem solving behaviors. And lastly it helps with pro social and cooperative behavior. So it helps us understand and predict other people's actions. Mirror neurons promote cooperation and pro social behaviors like helping and shar. But in a nutshell, this is what I want you to really think about with mirror neurons. When a child's melting down, we tend to mirror them. We feel their energy, we feel their stress. Our heart starts to beat faster. It's just kind of setting off the fire alarms in our body because our job is to keep our child safe and happy. And then all of a sudden they're not. So then we're not right? So we have to, we have to do the things that will help us keep, get ourselves in a calmer state so that they can imitate us. And so getting lower than them, breathing slowly, just being very, very intentional, not talking a lot, just helping them, just, just being with them and helping them feel like they're safe. So if we're starting to escalate and be like, take a deep breath. What's wrong? Calm down. You know? And they're like. And you're just. And then you're, You're. You're escalating. That's not helping them. So you have to be the one. You're the adult, so you have. You have to be the one to just bring yourself down. And that's why it's so important to take care of your own nervous system, because when you can get yourself back in the green zone, then they can come back to the green zone. And that is the main thing that I want you to think about with mirror neurons, is somebody's gonna. One is gonna copy the other. So we want them to copy you staying calm versus you copying them as they're starting to get dysregulated. And it's not easy because it's just such a. Such a natural response when your child is in distress for you to feel distress. So it's not easy thing to do. But that's why we're doing a whole week on this. On this whole concept of being able to calm yourself. Because. Because if you can do that, then you have a much better chance of. Of helping your child. You need all three. Calm yourself, calm the environment, and then the tools to calm the child. All right, aloha. And we'll see you in the next video.