Embed from Getty Images
—
Think about the last time you saw a spicy chick-flick or maybe a fierce shoot-‘em-up. At the end of the movie, did you stand up, dry-eyed and calm, and say to yourself, “Hmmm, nicely written and directed”?
I doubt it. I think you felt a rush of pleasure as you sensed his/her lips on your own lips; I think your heart was pounding with triumph as the bad guys were marched off to jail or lay dead in the street.
Why do we react this way to movies—and books, plays, and video games? The answer comes from biology: mirror neurons. These are specialized nerve cells in our brains that make us feel, when we observe something, that it had actually happened to us.
This is true whether the thing we perceive is virtual or real; for example, if we should (unfortunately) see someone get sick and throw up, we often retch ourselves. If a child falls on her bike, we wince with pain on our own actually-unbruised knees.
If you are watching some good porn, you can become aroused and even orgasm. If you are shooting enemies in a video game, your brain and body feel as though you killed something.
|
Mirror neurons “were first discovered in the early 1990s, when a team of Italian researchers found individual neurons in the brains of macaque monkeys that fired both when the monkeys grabbed an object and also when the monkeys watched another primate grab the same object” (Winerman, “The Mind’s Mirror,” Monitor 36:9).
There are studies that establish the action of mirror neurons in humans and there are also many studies that show how we literally experience what others are feeling—because of mirror neurons.
It happens to monkeys and it happens to us. And understanding mirror neurons is vital to understanding how we humans experience the world. Dr. S. Ramachandran called the discovery of mirror neurons one of the “single most important unpublicized stories of the decade.”
Take a leap with me here. If you are watching some good porn, you can become aroused and even orgasm. If you are shooting enemies in a video game, your brain and body feel as though you killed something.
Is this process a guess, a hypothesis? No, it’s science. And this is something that gun aficionados, including semi-automatic-weapon partisans, may never, ever acknowledge. They usually bluster that violent movies and video games have nothing, nothing to do with mass shootings or other terrorizing events. But they are mistaken; neural science substantiates that.
Now consider the fact that almost all video games involve shooting—and usually not target shooting. Players shoot people, who struggle, fall, and bleed when they’re hit. That’s the thrill. Then players go on to hunt and kill other people, more and more, till they reach a goal of some kind, get points, and then go on: shooting, killing.
I wish that parents, grandparents, teachers, therapists—everyone!—could appreciate the science of mirror neurons.
|
I am interested in the science, yes, but I’m also feeling this deeply as a teacher, as a mother, and as a grandmother. I remember the afternoon I watched over the shoulder of my then 13-year-old as he played “Grand Theft Auto,” a game I had innocently bought for him that week. I remember my nausea and dismay as I watched him shoot and kill character after character. “Don’t worry, Mom,” he said, when I asked him how he felt about these acts of violence. “It’s not real.”
You would agree, right? We know the difference. However, as I wrote in the beginning here, if we watched movies or played games only to appreciate the intellectual and artistic content, we just wouldn’t do it. We watch and play because our mirror neurons give us experiences that we register as real. We do it for the thrill.
“But not every young man who plays video games will become a school shooter,” gun proponents knee-jerk argue. Of course, that’s true. However, let’s remember something that few of us like to think about directly, and that is the messy nature of childhood. None of us grows up unscathed. When a little boy watches his dad slap his mother, he feels the pain—but, identifying with the father—perhaps he also feels the power and punch of the blow in his own hand.
When a little girl is forced to watch pornography with her predatory uncle, she cannot help but become engaged and aroused. And this aspect of growing up doesn’t only apply to these types of trauma (which, as you know, are so widespread as to be almost universal). As children, we can also interpret small, less-violent experiences in ways that become triggers to problems when we grow up.
It is the nature of humanity to grow up with pain, emotional trauma, misapprehensions, twists of thought, and odd behaviors, if not from our families of origin then certainly from our neighborhoods and friends. No one escapes. I like to think that this is the meaning of life: to see, understand, overcome and transcend our childhoods. We bring all of our messiness to every experience, including relationships, work—and media.
I am not saying that we should regulate movies and games or make them illegal—oh, wait, we already do; we do in the cases of child pornography and snuff films. We do it not only to protect the victims in these videos but also—I would say, to be compassionate, I would say—to protect potential perpetrators who, viewing these horrors, their mirror neurons firing and their bodies filled with adrenaline (and perhaps dopamine) after experiencing-as-real these images of destruction, desire more and go on to act out these scenes themselves.
What should we do? The truth is, I don’t know. But the first step is a conversation. I wish that parents, grandparents, teachers, therapists—everyone!—could appreciate the science of mirror neurons. When we do, we may begin to observe our own selves, how we feel and respond when we watch movies and play games. And then, hopefully, we may take a step back to consider what movies and games we bring into our lives and into our children’s lives—especially our boys, who have somehow grown up to be the shooters in today’s recurring tragedies.
—
The role of men is changing in the 21st century. Want to keep up?
Get the best stories from The Good Men Project delivered straight to your inbox, here.
—
Photo Credit: Getty Images