Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, it's a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that at some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right?

It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music

when it's out of ice cream.

Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds.

Just relax. That's what the lab technicians tell you. But an fMRI scanner is not a relaxing place to spend half an hour. You must lie still as a corpse inside a metal tube and allow your body to be subjected to the play of magnetic fields. The machine shudders and clangs.

You can speak with the technicians on the outside via an intercom, but for the most part, you just

try to suppress the panicky claustrophobia blossoming in your chest. It's hard to imagine

anyone giggling. Yet they do when Professor Sophie Scott of University College London conducts her

experiments she plays laughter tracks over the intercom soon the belly wobbling

of her research subjects can be heard under the din of the scanner and the subtle changes in

the distribution of blood in their brains can be seen on the computer screens outside.

Among the brain processes which neuroscientists hope to make visible using fMRI scans,

the hunt for mirror neurons is probably the most controversial.

In the 1990s, neuroscientists at the University of Palmer identified cells in the brains of monkeys,

which fired not only when a monkey performed a given action, but also when it saw another monkey do so too.

The Italian researchers dubbed these cells mirror neurons,

and in the last 20 years they have become one of the most widely

debated concepts in neuroscience. Advocates of mirror neuron theory, for example the neuroscientist

Vilayneur Ramachandran, argued that a mirror response is very likely present in the human brain too,

and may explain how we feel vicarious emotions like empathy, learn languages,

and forge societies. They would certainly explain why so many of us find ourselves giggling or

yawning when someone else does so too. Other neuroscientists are more cautious, reminding us that

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