I was reading about ‘mirror neurons’ in V S Ramachandran’s The Tell Tale Brain: the neurons responsible for gauging other people’s intentionality by mimicking their actions in the brain. For instance, when someone reaches for an object, the same action is repeated by mirror neurons of someone watching, though there is a ‘suppression response’ that prevents the watcher from mimicking the action as well. These mirror neurons are also responsible for learning by imitation, empathy, synaesthesia, ‘cross modal abstraction’ (deriving an abstract quality from impressions between sensory and motor maps; metaphors are an example of this) that is the basis for full-fledged or high-level language, and even consciousness (self-reflective awareness).
They may be completely unrelated, but funny how the concepts and the words sound similar to advaita concepts: prakasa vimarsa, abhasa vadha, pratibimba vadha are examples (reality/consciousness is a delusion caused by the reflection of the brahman on the mind). According to pratibimba vadha, all experience is merely a projection of the mind, and reality has no objective existence.
And Daniel Dennet’s theory of consciousness as something that is not an experience (as in the experience of the colour red, for instance) but just the physical phenomena of wavelengths and nerve excitations. This sounds like the anatma vadha of Buddhism.