Forgetting the Mind/Body Split And Mirror Neurons Magic: N&S Guests Posts

Spotlight on Neuroscience&Psychotherapy readers' publications. Week 1.

I am so happy to see so many people interested in the neuroscience and psychotherapy nexus. It is the reason for this collection: hearing other people’s thoughts and ideas on this topic I am passionate about.

I had no say over what and how people write their stuff - as long as it fits the criteria, relevant for neuroscience and psychotherapy integration and human-written. I don’t necessarily agree or disagree, approve or disapprove, as this is not about me.

Please read along, give it up for the authors and check their substack publications.

Today I feature two authors:

• Nick Perri @ quasi Uomo is writing about why play belongs at the heart of therapy. Nick is a mental health worker, artist, and MSc in Neuroscience. He finishing a Master of Counselling while moonlighting as a poet, DJ, puppeteer, mixed-media tinkerer, and neurodiversity advocate.

• Marwa Mabrouk @ Marwa Mabrouk is writing about highly sensitive people and the role of mirror neurons. Marwa is deep feeler/ thinker, with many interests.

I am handing it over to them now.

Forget the mind/body split: change is embodied, relational, and played.

Why play belongs at the heart of therapy, and how our obsession with introspection leaves too many people behind.

Written: Nick Perri quasi Uomo

Play as Resistance: Why Therapy Needs More Toys, Less Introspection

What if it looks like the sensorimotor, embodied interaction of Lego bricks or finger paint? The symbolic imagination of boundless tales with a box of mismatched puppets? The posthumanist, co-created space of relationalism through connection, attachment, and community?

For a longgggg time, the dominant idea in psychology has been that change comes from looking inward. Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) are examples of these models, built around introspection. Clients are expected to reflect on their thoughts, notice their urges, track their feelings, and then restructure them into something more adaptive.

This sounds reasonable… until you notice who gets left out.

The Tyranny of Introspection

Introspection is not a universal skill. It’s a cultural bias masquerading as a clinical truth.

In practice, introspection requires a client to be articulate, reflective, and verbally agile. It assumes that the most valuable knowledge about the self is the kind that can be spoken out loud in complete sentences. But many people don’t process experience this way.

Autistic people, for example, may communicate through rhythm, metaphor, or action instead of direct introspective insight. People with ADHD may find structured self-monitoring overwhelming. Trauma survivors often live inside bodies that tell stories long before the mind can catch up.

Yet too often, therapy treats these differences as deficits. If you can’t neatly think about your feelings, the implication is that you’re not ready to “do the work.” Instead of starting bottom-up, therapies are expected to adapt and accommodate only when differences become barriers. This is more than a clinical mismatch—it’s what some call epistemic injustice: the denial of someone’s way of knowing because it doesn’t fit the dominant mold.

The Brain Doesn’t Care About Your Self-Help Journal

Neuroscience is catching up to what many clients already know intuitively: not all healing comes from words.

The brain’s default mode network (DMN), the system often linked with self-reflection and narrative identity, develops long before kids learn to sit down and analyze their feelings. Early attachment, caregiver-infant synchrony, playful gestures, and sensory exploration all help shape the brain’s sense of self.

In other words: your ability to know who you are is literally built out of play.

But conventional therapy often ignores this. It tries to tinker with the DMN through heavy doses of introspection – journaling, reframing, and mindfulness exercises built on self-awareness, reflection, acceptance, or noticing. This metacognition certainly works for some, but for others it only entrenches rumination, leaving them stuck in extreme loops of self-critique, or disengagement with the world.

Play, by contrast, doesn’t just activate the DMN. It also lights up the brain’s salience network (the part that decides what’s meaningful) and frontoparietal network (goal-directed action). When you build a tower, roleplay a story, or even rock back and forth rhythmically, salience to these operations can shift our presence from our zoomed in minds towards the zoomed out world, and vice versa.

Why Play Belongs in Therapy Rooms

The beauty of play is that it doesn’t demand words. It doesn’t even demand insight.

A child who draws storm clouds isn’t required to explain what they “mean.” A teenager pacing the room in rhythm is regulating their nervous system. An adult in a sand tray, arranging miniatures into strange symbolic patterns, is working through relational and emotional dynamics that might never surface in conversation.

In play, every behaviour counts as communication. Rocking, scripting lines from a favourite movie, or doodling endlessly on a page are not meaningless habits to extinguish. They are embodied forms of meaning-making.

When therapists meet clients in this space, they stop acting like judges of inner truth and become co-players, co-regulators, and co-creators.

The Trouble with Words

Symbolic play also challenges our obsession with language.

Think about metaphor. It’s one of the most powerful tools humans have for making sense of experience. But metaphors don’t have to be spoken. They can be acted, drawn, hummed, or repeated like a script.

Autistic “scripting,” where someone repeats movie lines or favourite phrases, is often pathologized as meaningless repetition. But what if it’s actually metaphorical shorthand for an act of re-staging memory, emotion, or perspective?

Play therapy treats these symbolic gestures as valid in themselves. The therapist doesn’t force the client to decode them. Instead, meaning emerges in the shared space between expression and response. It’s closer to jazz improvisation than academic interpretation.

Therapy as Co-Creation

The heart of play therapy is posthumanist relational humility.

Too often, therapy assumes the client must produce introspection, and the therapist’s job is to interpret and guide. Play flips that script. In a playful frame, the therapist joins the client in co-creating meaning. The session becomes a third space, that Winnicott writes about, where new patterns can emerge. This space isn’t quite exclusively internal nor purely external.

Sometimes this looks like mirroring gestures. Sometimes it looks like building something together. Sometimes it looks like both parties sitting in silence, allowing shared presence to carry the work.

This doesn’t just sound nice; it’s effective. Decades of psychotherapy research suggest that the single biggest predictor of success is not the technique but the relationship. Play foregrounds this truth by embedding therapy in mutual experience rather than verbal performance.

My Own Experience

I’ve spent a decade working with neurodivergent children, teens, and young adults. Some of the most meaningful therapeutic moments I’ve witnessed had nothing to do with words. I’ve seen a nonspeaking child communicate comfort by rhythmically rocking beside me, both of us breathing on our own but in the same shared space. I’ve watched a teenager use Teletubby metaphors to express grief they couldn’t articulate otherwise. I’ve sat with adults who used scripting from TV shows as a way to share emotion, layered, complex, and far more honest than a forced “I feel” statement.

In my art practice, I’ve also felt the visceral power of play. I construct miniature worlds out of cheap souvenirs, fake pets, and everyday kitsch. These small and laughably gaudy objects become portals into grief, joy, and memory. Every time I watch someone gaze into these scenes, their body reacts before their words do. That’s what I think therapy should feel like.

These experiences convinced me that play isn’t childish. It’s one of the most serious, human things we can do together.

Play as Justice

This isn’t just about technique. It’s about ethics.

When therapy demands that clients conform to introspective norms, it places the burden of adaptation on the individual. It says: your way of being is wrong, fix it by thinking harder.

Play says something different: your way of being already makes sense, we just need to meet it.

Seen this way, play therapy isn’t childish or frivolous. It’s an act of posthumanist relational justice. It refuses to pathologize non-normative communication styles. It recognizes that bodies, gestures, and metaphors are as real as words. It insists that healing doesn’t require self-analysis; sometimes, healing is shared, enacted, and felt.

Beyond the Couch

What would it mean to take play seriously as a cultural force in mental health?

It would mean funding therapies that don’t depend on verbal sophistication. It would mean valuing support workers, teachers, and caregivers who co-regulate through everyday play. It would mean expanding our definition of “therapy” beyond 50-minute sessions into classrooms, community centers, and playgrounds.

It would also mean resisting the medical model that frames difference as defect. If disability often arises not from the body itself but from environments that don’t fit the body, then therapy must adapt to the client, not the other way around.

The Art of Being Human

At its core, play is resistance. It resists the reduction of human experience to words, diagnoses, or introspective checklists. It resists the idea that healing is an agential duty to control a dual-processing mode of effortful agency that often splits the client into responsible mind, and automatic body. 

Philosopher Miguel Sicart once wrote that play is not the opposite of seriousness, but a way of being in the world with care, curiosity, and resistance. Therapy could learn from this.

Because not all pain speaks in language. Not all healing comes from reflection. Some healing is rhythmic. Some healing is metaphorical. Some healing, crucially, is played.

Nick’s Bio

I’m Nick Perri, a mental health worker, artist, and MSc in Neuroscience who has spent over a decade supporting autistic kids, teens, and young adults with different intellectual abilities and disabilities. These days I’m finishing a Master of Counselling while moonlighting as a poet, DJ, puppeteer, mixed-media tinkerer, and neurodiversity advocate. My writing explores the messy overlaps between psychology, embodiment, and play across therapy rooms, community spaces, and the transitional space of probabilistic agency. I riff on the priors of neuroscience, posteriors of post hoc evolution, and a posteriori Bayesian likelihood of phenomenological experience, all mixed with rotted absurdism slop. I sincerely believe that psychological change for serious things, like healing, connection, and survival, happen through play. Substack quasi Uomo

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Biological Magic of Mirror Neuron Systems

The Unbelievable Case of Highly Sensitive People and Empaths

Written: Marwa Mabrouk Marwa Mabrouk

The Mirror neuron system has been dubbed the most important discovery of neuroscience in the last decades, it has been almost the most researched in its field since then, and it’s been claimed to be the key capability that shaped human behavior and civilization.

Mirror neuron systems inside the brain enable our understanding of the actions and emotions of other people. Interestingly, Mirror neurons were discovered by a group of neurophysiologists in the 1990s as a surprise observation during a neuron study on macaque monkeys.

The researchers observed certain Mirror neurons become active, for example, when we do a physical action like picking up something delicate with two fingers. The discovery was that the same neurons will also become active when we’re looking at someone else doing the same action.

Yes, the mirror neurons in both brains, the one taking the action, and the one observing it, will be active in the same parts of both brains. This doesn’t just happen in physical proximity, it will also happen over large distances and at different times, as when observed on a video, live or recorded.

The saying that when you connect with people you are on the same wavelength wasn’t very far off. Mirror neurons in both brains are actively synchronizing the brains. Amazingly, that can happen regardless of differences in distance or even time.

We don’t know how this happens. However, every human being, and as observed in macaque monkeys other living beings as well, use this magic. The following are examples of our mirror neurons at work building these “magical” connections between our brains:

• Observing how someone else is solving a problem to learn how to do the same

• Sharing feelings like love or anger

• Mastering a skill by playing it in your head over and over

• Communicating about ideas or stories

Mirror Neuron Systems in HSPs

It’s hard to talk about HSPs without talking about Mirror Neurons. After all, many HSPs have been nicknamed Empaths because of this unusual capacity for empathy.

As discussed in the past, the HSP brain is wired for deep processing all the time, even when resting. But another prominent area where the HSP brain is unique is mirror neurons — they are more active in the HSP brain. This could be the answer to the mystery of how HSPs are able to share emotions and closely mimic physical expressions. These two areas are where HSPs tend to show unique strengths when compared to other brains.

HSPs have all the strengths and benefits of mirror neuron systems amplified ...

Dr Elayne Daniels, a prominent psychologist in HSP research, describes HSPs as the most powerful social machine in the known universe. What she’s talking about has nothing to do with being introverted or extroverted, it’s about the HSP brain being almost entirely wired to connect with others.

It’s pretty common for an HSP to step into a room of strangers and immediately read the room’s energy, before any social interaction with anyone — thanks to the more active mirror neuron system and the HSP’s unique brain chemistry.

For the non-HSPs reading this and thinking that it must be very easy to communicate with people when you can read their feelings like an HSP, the following are examples that explain the true nature of this dilemma:

Not everyone is happy to be seen this clearly

The number of people out there who see someone reading their emotions clearly as a threat is not small, not to mention how many are completely disconnected from their heartfelt feelings that HSPs can read. HSPs are notorious for acting on what they’re sensing from a person, thinking this will establish a connection, only to be faced with denials or rejections, discovering they have just opened the door to a sensitive insecurity or a well-guarded secret.

HSPs are perfect mirrors when they choose it

HSPs can be perfect mirrors of another person, changing the way they talk, their voice, and their physical expressions, even mimicking subtle gestures to match another person. That is known as one of their biggest natural advantages to put other people in a state of ease. HSPs are famous for being the person everyone can pour their heart out to and feel comforted by the act, thanks to their free-of-judgment mirroring. However, this always leaves a question unanswered: who is the real HSP behind the mirroring?

Emotional Amplification

HSPs experience the emotions of others as if they are their own. The more sensitive they are to feelings, the more amplified the emotions they feel are. This is compounded by their own unusually strong emotions when responding to external factors. In a heavy emotional setting of a negative nature, HSPs are notorious for having extremely strong amplified responses — they are not people to mess with in a setting like that. In a setting where emotions are positive, HSPs are famous for bringing a lot of joy and happiness, amplifying the positivity to unusual levels. They become the people who bring laughter, comfort, and healing.

In each of the cases above, Mirror neuron systems play an obvious role, making HSPs anything but ordinary in the middle of ordinary situations. I’m definitely looking forward to hearing about additional research on more applications of Mirror neuron systems in HSPs, such as learning.

Mirror Neuron Systems in Empaths

Empaths are individuals who are highly attuned to the emotions and energy of others, often feeling those emotions in their own bodies, as defined by Dr Judith Orloff. They are extremely sensitive on the HSP scale, and everything is even more amplified in their case.

Using the same prior example — stepping into a room of strangers — an empath will immediately read the energy of the room. In addition, empaths will physically react. Mirror neuron systems play a profound impact in that case.

Positive physical reactions will bring amazing sensations of well-being. However, it’s the negative physical reactions that are always talked about first. I wanted to include some of the most common examples to bring clarity to what those physical reactions are like. They can occur during or after contact with people:

• Stomachache

• Burning or sore throat

• Headaches in different parts of the head

• Shifting aches all over the body

• Aches inside the bones

• Unusual long hours of sleep

• Upset digestive system

• Breathing difficulties

• Heart/chest ache or irregular heartbeat

• Patches of red skin

• Sudden unexplained severe anxiety symptoms

For an empath, if any of these symptoms are not tied to a medical issue, and they seem to come and go unexpectedly, then it’s probably a reaction to negative emotions and thoughts from someone else. It’s important to be aware of it and trained to self-care through it. They can last for days and weeks if not handled properly.

This is one of the main reasons I prefer to separate Empaths from HSPs. When it comes to advice on how to empower ourselves, each should deploy a different strategy, given how physical symptoms can burden our well-being.

HSPs and Empaths can do amazing things when they understand their strengths and how to work with them. This is just the beginning of exploring the incredible ways our brains shape who we are — and an example of how understanding your unique brain wiring can transform your life.

To follow Marwa

Marwa Mabrouk highseasmind.substack.com

marwamabrouk.com