For my second piece on neuro-myths, I’m tackling head-on the biggest, hottest development in neuroscience, according to some observers, in the last 20 years: mirror neurons. So enthusiastically have scientists embraced them, that they have become a kind of neuro-scientific Rosetta Stone, making all sorts of mental phenomena clear that have hitherto been obscure.

They’ve been credited with explaining the following:

Stuttering

Schizophrenia

Imitation

Phantom limbs

Hypnosis

Sexual orientation

Cigarette smoking

Political attitudes

Facial emotional recognition

Business leadership

Obesity

Love

Yawning

Music appreciation

Sport appreciation

Drub abuse

Risk assessment

Self-awareness in dolphins

And many more.

What are these amazing super-human mirror neurons? For the uninitiated, let me tell you a short story.

Giacomo Rizzolatti and his team of researchers in Parma, Italy, were working on research into the functioning of the brain, using monkeys as test subjects, back in the nineties, when one of the researchers noticed something odd. The monkeys were hooked up to machines that registered their brain activity. As a reward for the various things the humans were getting the monkeys to do, the monkeys received peanuts, a food they love. When you give a monkey a peanut, he grabs it, and the pleasure centers of his brain light up like Christmas.

One day, the researcher absentmindedly—or perhaps with malice aforethought—ate one of the peanuts himself rather than feeding it to the monkey. The researcher was astonished to see that the monkey’s pleasure centers lit up, just as if the monkey had eaten the peanut himself.

What was going on? After lots more investigation, the team discovered that monkeys and humans both have mirror neurons that mimic both actions and emotions of the simians and people around them. Our sense of empathy with our fellow humans, then, is real; when we see someone experience joy or sorrow, we experience that emotion with them. It’s not that we appreciate the emotion or understand it intellectually from a distance. We actually experience it. We are an empathetic species.

As Rizzolatti explains, “The instantaneous understanding of the emotions of others, rendered possible by the emotional mirror neuron system, is a necessary condition for the empathy which lies at the root of most of our more complex inter-individual relationships.” What Rizzolatti is saying is that most of human relations would not be possible without mirror neurons, because we wouldn’t be able to understand our fellow humans. And understanding is a first step in most human interaction.

OK, so where’s the myth?

Into all this love and understanding comes Gregory Hickok, a rival neuroscientist, wielding Occam’s Razor and a host of other rhetorical weapons, in his new book, The Myth of Mirror Neurons. Hickok argues that the science that underpins most of the more far-fetched application of the idea of mirror neurons is unproven. Well, yes. But for precisely the reason that other scientists have leaped with too much enthusiasm on the mirror neurons idea – its explanatory power – we shouldn’t be ready to give up on it yet. It is the best explanation for how the human mind accomplishes certain things as quickly and accurately as it does. It just hasn’t been finally proven yet. It’s an hypothesis.

The book is mis-titled. Hickok doesn’t disprove the basic mirror neuron hypothesis. He just points out that the speculation has gone too far, too fast.  And he prunes away a good deal of the enthusiastic growth of ideas around the original root. He’s right to do that. But he’s wrong to crankily dismiss the whole idea just because others have taken it up so enthusiastically. Sure, we have lots more work to do to understand mirror neurons, human empathy, and the brain in general. We’re infants on that journey of understanding. But until someone comes along with something better, mirror neurons are a powerful way to explain and understand some vital aspects of the human mind, and there’s good – if preliminary – evidence that they are real.

What are the takeaways for public speakers and communicators? As long as people are empathetic and share emotions, speakers need to take charge of their own emotions, because whatever they show up with they’re going to leak to the audience. If the speaker is excited, the audience will be. If the speaker is nervous, the audience will be too – and it won’t listen.

So don’t wait until mirror neurons are proven to exist beyond a shadow of a neuro-scientific doubt. Do the work to take charge of your emotions as a speaker – as a leader – now, and take charge of the room.

I explain in more detail how to do this in my book Power Cues: the Subtle Science of Leading Groups, Persuading Others, and Maximizing Your Personal Impact, published this year by Harvard. You can find it here.