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About 15 years ago researchers in Italy discovered a pretty interesting thing about the brain. When one of their research monkeys was hooked up to a scanner they observed a certain frontal brain pattern as the monkey picked up and ate a peanut. No surprise there. But when they observed the same patterns in the same monkey as he/she watched another eat a peanut, that was surprising. The same neurons get excited whether the monkey was actually doing an action or just observing it. The idea that doing or observing produces the same neuronal pattern become known as mirror neurons.

My immediate thought at learning about this turned to sports. If you can learn by observing someone performing an action (and then imitating it), then why don’t you become a scratch golfer just by watching championship golf tournaments? As many a duffer can testify, it doesn’t seem to work this way.

One of the commonly cited examples of mirror neurons in learning is that of a new born baby sticking out his/her tongue after observing a parent do the same. But sticking out a tongue is a pretty simple action, and, let’s face it, the newborn doesn’t have much else occupying his time anyway.

But something like a golf swing or tennis stroke is much more complex. And it probably isn’t an action that you have performed well in the past, or maybe performed at all. This is what I suspect is behind not being able to challenge Tiger Woods just from watching him take a few shots — the action that you’re observing and imitating isn’t familiar to you.

That by itself is not enough to doom your learning and mastery. After all, any action is composed of smaller actions. Tennis involves running, planting your feet, watching a moving object, ect., all things most of us are familiar with:

“When you see me perform an action - such as picking up a baseball - you automatically simulate the action in your own brain,” said Dr. Marco Iacoboni, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies mirror neurons. “Circuits in your brain, which we do not yet entirely understand, inhibit you from moving while you simulate,” he said. “But you understand my action because you have in your brain a template for that action based on your own movements. From Cells That Read Minds.

But there are many movements that most of us are not familiar with, especially as we age. The variety of movements that most of us are capable of and the actual movements we choose to make regularly is vastly different.

That helps explain the insufficiency of the mirror neuron idea as a universal athletic learning idea. It’s the combination of simple-to-do and familiar movements, coupled with putting them together in the right environment that makes for good athletic learning. At least that’s what I think.

But one of the coolest things about mirror neurons in humans is the ability they give us to feel the emotions of others performing an action, to be relatively familiar with the intentions behind their actions. Of such things are empathy made.

So, though I haven’t become a scratch golfer from watching, I found watching the last round of last week’s U.S. Open a pretty visceral experience. Phil Mickelson was leading the tournament by 2 shots with 2 holes to go. On the last hole, he hit his drive way off target, then hit a tree with his next shot, and then buried his next shot deep in a sand trap with little hope of getting out in the one shot he needed to at least tie and qualify for a playoff. He blew it, big time. In front of millions of people.

Why the visceral experience from me at watching all this? Mirror neurons. I don’t have a neural template for a championship swing; that’s something completely unfamiliar. But I have hit drives way off target, and I have hit trees and seen the ball bounce backward, and, goodness knows, I have been deeply in the sand on more than one occasion. And isn’t embarrassment in front of others a pretty universally shared experience. So I felt for old Phil as he hacked his way out of a major championship.

Motor neurons. The idea will probably turn out to explain a lot about the human condition, about how we got to be where we are now. In the meantime, stay out of those sand traps.