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Sure, though consciousness persists even when external stimuli is temporarily suspended, and the mirror-neurone system has nothing to work with… Doesn’t it…?

Interestingly, it can plug into Crick et al’s theory of dreaming; namely, that dreaming amounts to the “unlearning” of “parasitic” loops within an associative network through the closing down of input and output channels and then firing random inputs from the brainstem. Nature article here http://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/SC/B/C/D/K/_/scbcdk.pdf