If you have had a baby, then you have been kept up at night, lost sleep, been interrupted from something important, and been more or less stressed out! Along that way most parents figure out how to keep their babies occupied-or preoccupied. It usually isn't all that much, but every little bit of time one can get while a newborn is in the house is like a diamond in your backyard.

When we were raising our three children, we got crib toys. These were things strung across the top of the crib or even attached to a side, and they twirled, bounced, and otherwise moved in some way. The idea was that the baby would become fascinated with them and give the parent some time. It turns out that such things may have been more helpful than first thought.

The mirror neuron system in human beings is what enables us to comprehend intentional movement, action, and even some emotional content in other people that we observe.

Developmental psychologists Vittorio Gallese, Magali Rochat, and Guiseppe Cossu of the University of Parma and Corrado Sinigaglia of the University of Milan claim this ability is basic to human functionality: "Fundamental among social abilities is the capacity to accurately detect and understand the intentional conduct of others, to anticipate their upcoming actions, and to appropriately adjust one's own behaviour."

Some people call it a 'mind reading capacity'. Well, it's not really mind reading, because it is more pre-reflective, pre-verbal, so no one is looking at someone else and saying to him or herself, 'I know what you're thinking!' It's more the instinctive knowing what another person is doing or about to do.

It is now thought that mirror neurons develop. That is, we are not born with a full set of them. We 'make' them through experience, and we have to do that when we are still very young. The mirror neurons form in the perceptual-motor pathways in the extremities and correspond to mirror neurons in the motor cortexes of the brain, and they form in infancy when infants reach out to explore their worlds.

Have you ever noticed how a baby is drawn towards your hand, and how the baby is apt to grasp hold of your finger? That process produces mirror neurons. When our babies reached out to play with the crib toys, they established perceptual-motor experience that helped lay down a kind of cerebral 'map', and it is that mapping that allows mirror neurons to sense what others are doing when they, in turn, 'reach out' (so to speak).

This is where enrichment comes in. Parents are always looking for ways to help their children succeed, be smarter, have a leg up on others when they get to formal schooling. They play language tapes while the baby sleeps. Okay. Maybe that helps the infant by pacifying the baby's parents.

However, if they really want to help their child, if they want to give their child a kind of basic sense of how to navigate the world, especially the social world in which they will need to be able to understand the actions and experience of others, then parents should enrich their infants lives with copious amounts of action-oriented exploration.

When the baby can hold his or head up, put the baby on a blanket on the floor and lay down next to it. Let the baby see your face and hands and let the baby reach out for you, 'find' you, and play with you. Action oriented exploration that involves other people multiplies the effect. When the baby begins to crawl, let him or her crawl. Let the baby explore, but be wise. Parents need to protect their babies, but that doesn't mean leaving them in a swing or a play pin. (There are times for the swing and play pin, but these things tend to become 'baby sitters'.) As the baby explores, he or she connects what is perceived with a motor response that gives meaning to it, mirror neurons are formed, and they encode the perceptual-motor significance. Thus, a very basic map of the world forms in infancy, and it is this motor-neuron system that allows people later in life to see someone and 'know' what they are doing or what they are going to do next.

Some psychologists believe this ability to know the intentions of others leads to a kind of perspective taking in emotional terms, which is called empathy. Thus, it may very well be that a parent who enriches a baby's life by letting that infant crawl and explore, reach out and grab, etc, is building a future in which, after the baby grows up, he or she will be better able to understand the feelings of others. And that would be a gift far greater than the ability to skip a grade or two in school. Mirror neurons, and the mirror neuron system, continue to draw the interest of research psychologists. We are bound to discover more about them. However, in the meantime, parents might find some solace for lack of sleep and loss of free time in the knowledge that this period of infancy is a critical developmental time zone for the creation of a neural capacity essential to successful social life. Thus, for a parent it's time well lost.