It should surprise no one that the Italians are the ones leading the way when it comes to understanding the science of love. They have had a virtual monopoly on the subject since they were called Romans and stole the emotion from the Greeks. But what might be surprising is that this most recent scientific foray into understanding the power of Cupid's arrow started with a totally loveless relationship between a monkey and a peanut.

In the early 1990s a University of Parma lab headed by Giacomo Rizzolatti conducted experiments in which Rizzolatti and his collaborators recorded the activities of motor neurons in the brain of macaque monkeys before, during, and after the monkey picked up a peanut. In studying the area of the brain related to hand movements (and the adjacent mouth movement-related area), the team hoped to gain a better understanding of language and motor skill development. But during the course of one of their experiments, the scientists recorded something unexpected: upon seeing an experimenter pick up the peanut, the monkey's neurons would fire according to the same pattern they had when the monkey had actually picked up the peanut itself. To this part of the brain, then, seeing and doing were the same thing.

In a 1992 paper, Rizzolatti coined the term 'mirror neurons' to describe these structures. These days, they are all the rage: the quarterly news magazine NOVA scienceNow recently ran a feature on them, and in the last four years over 200 scientific papers have used the term 'mirror neuron' as compared to about 50 in the entire decade before. Over this time, the scientific knowledge base has grown both in terms of the specificity with which we understand the structure of these neurons and in terms of the potential implications we see for their existence. First, scientists have done a better job of physically locating this type of neuronal behavior. They now describe it as occurring in Broca's Area and in the premotor cortex of the brain - that is, in the areas that were previously thought only to be responsible for preparations for upcoming movements. Physically speaking, all of this brain activity occurs in a narrow band of neurons that stretches from the left side of your skull to the right, just in front of your ears.

Second, as interest in mirror neurons has spread to more and more fields of scientific endeavor, the scientific community's collective appreciation of them has grown accordingly. Some scientists are beginning to believe that mirror neurons are centrally implicated in the development of language, in our ability to understand other peoples' emotions, and even in the development of culture. According to Marco Jacoboni of UCLA (ahem, note nationality), mirror neurons don't simply help us as we learn to copy other peoples' actions, but they also allow us to literally feel their emotions. In an experiment where test subjects were given pictures of other people expressing a range of emotions, CT scans of their brains showed that simply looking at the pictures was enough to activate the neurons responsible for making individuals feel those emotions themselves.

Renowned neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran has extended the importance of our mirror neuron system to an even more fundamental level. Indeed, he has termed mirror neurons "the most important unreported story of the last decade" because of the way he believes they have impacted the evolutionary history of humankind. In a widely published essay he claims that "mirror neurons will do for psychology what DNA did for biology: they will provide a unifying framework and help explain a host of mental abilities that have hitherto remained mysterious and inaccessible to experiments."

In the 1850s Lord Wallace (the fellow who, besides Darwin, figured out natural selection) noticed a glitch in human evolutionary history: even though our brains reached their present size about 250,000 years ago, many of our best qualities - skilled tool use, computational excellence, musical ability, a penchant for wearing clothes - did not appear until about 40,000 years ago. According to Wallace's assessment, the key evolutionary step enabling the rise of human culture over that of other primates was not an increase in brain size per se, but rather a change in some structure within the brain. Ramachandran believes that the development of mirror neurons provided just that structural change. By improving our ability to copy, learn, teach and empathize, says Ramachandran, a more advanced system of mirror neurons allows humans to adapt to changing environments more quickly than other creatures. It allows us to develop consistent traditions and cultures. And ultimately, it allows us to build civilizations.

But what does all this mean for us, and more importantly, for our love lives? The emotional contagion implied by the presence of mirror neurons - this ability to truly feel what those around you are feeling simply by looking at them - is not a foreign experience to anyone. We've all felt it before, and I hope we will all feel it again. In the NOVA piece, host Robert Krulwich invokes the raucous atmosphere of big-time sporting events as an example of emotional contagion run amok, but even during more mundane activities, such as entering a room in which people are at odds with one another, mirror neurons seem ready and willing to fire like crazy.

What I'm left wondering in the face of all this, though, is how come these things so often fail? Why is understanding other people still the most difficult task around? And why are we so intuitively inclined to believe that other peoples' mirror neurons will pick up what we are putting down? If we are hard wired to sense, experience and return other people's feelings, how come relationships go bust with such alarming frequency? And finally, if we have this system of connections in our brains that has developed over hundreds of thousands of years to ensure that we do a better job of being social creatures, why do we have such a hard time living together? In short, how, when we know that mirror neurons exist and suspect that they were central in our development as the planet's primo species, do we explain the phenomenon of unrequited love?

The short answer is that mirror neurons aren't perfect. Nothing is - that's not how evolution works. And even a longer answer, one invoking every piece of scientific knowledge that we have on the subject of love, would provide little solace. This article can't tell you why you can't get a date. Neither can Giacomo Rizzolatti, Marco Jacoboni, or any of the myriad other scientist now experimenting with our mirror neuron system. But what they might be able to tell you is why you keep trying. And why it hurts so bad when you fail.

If this system of mirror neurons has grown in us over the millennia, our intuitive awareness of it should not be surprising. And for us to fall back on this knowledge in moments of uncertainty makes sense - we call that instinct. In this sense, then, it is logical for us to expect our love to be returned. We strive because we know intuitively that our behavior affects the feelings of others. We feel that if we can only show with absolute purity that we love this other person, then perhaps that person will be unable to tell the difference between our love and hers. She will adopt our love for her own.

And sometimes it does work out. Deep, deep connections can occur, where two people's love becomes one. But even if we can't always get our mirror neurons to fire at the same frequency as someone else's, we can still share with them on a deeply emotional level. The great tales of unrequited love in Western literature - those of Gatsby and Daisy, Quixote and Dulcinea, Yeats and Maude - have had as much staying power as any others we've ever told. The sorrow reflected in these tales breeds an empathy all its own, and the reason we still read Don Quixote four hundred years after its publication is that it speaks to us on some deep level. We feel what Quixote feels.

And so maybe the conclusion of this piece is that love is hard and complex and more than some cluster of neurons can handle. In a way, love is a higher level emotion; it is made up of lots of other emotions. It's not like anger or even happiness, which mirror neurons seem able to accommodate quite well. For these little tangles of cells that operate somewhere between feelings and motor skills, the ability to balance several emotions at once seems to be out of reach. I guess it should be no surprise, once again, that the Italians had this pegged from the start. What says love and imbalance better than a bottle of Carlo Rossi?

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