It's fascinating, really. Zelda notes that our brains think we're playing each role that we watch, and I remember a therapist once telling me the same thing about interpreting dreams: that the each character in a dream represents some component of the dreamer. So clearly our brains think of us in more complex ways than our consciousness allows us to acknowledge.

Still, in terms of watching porn in light of the mirror neuron findings, it seems like our brains must do a lot of extrapolating between the firing of the neurons and the interpretation of our sexual/emotional reaction to what we see. I'm thinking especially of that genre of visual porn that is shot from a "first person" perspective. A blow job filmed for a straight man's pleasure would show a woman sucking a man's cock, but the man would be largely invisible. Maybe his cock would be shown as the woman's mouth slid up and down on it, but most of the focus would be on her face, her mouth. The friend who loves this kind of porn explains to me that he loves it because he can really "feel" the sensations much more so than he can when watching "third person" porn. Yet he certainly wouldn't interpret his reaction as having anything to do with feeling the sensation of his own mouth moving on someone else's cock. He's only interpreting the feeling of someone else's mouth on his cock.

So what is the connection here between the firing of the mirror neurons and the "sensation" or the experience of viewing as it is interpreted by the viewer's conscious mind?

...because public space really matters!

Elizabeth