Likewise, most of us have experienced yawning when we see another person yawning. Or felt tears coming to our eyes when we saw someone weeping– or felt bad when we noticed someone else feeling bad. Maybe for a similar reason, simply smiling can make us feel more like– smiling. Why is that?
In the book Ethical Wisdom: What Makes Us Good, the author, Mark Matousek details how “a newborn baby, barely able to see, can imitate the facial expression of adults within one hour of delivery.” When the child imitates a caregiver, this creates a coupling between the baby’s expressions, its emotions, and the other person. When a baby sees its mother or guardian, it waits for the other to see it. And when she does see him, her, or them, the baby lights up.
Science fascinates me. Or maybe it’s the ability to closely study reality and recognize patterns and connections underlying what drives us to do what we do or feel what we feel. It can help us perceive the universe more “objectively,” meaning relatively free from the enclosure of ego, or without too many of our biases and personal stories getting in the way.
When I was teaching Psychological Literature for high school students, we read chapters in books by neuroscientist V. S Ramachandran, especially The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human. This book exemplified what I loved about science. It talked about so many topics that expanded our imagination and understanding of our humanity. It introduced us to imposter’s or Capgras syndrome, where we look at a person we know well, like our spouse or parent, and experience them as a stranger. Or synesthesia, which is when we blend our senses, so we might taste colors, see sounds, or hear shapes.
Students both loved the reading and yet had trouble believing the power of our brain to both expand our sense of ourselves or distort how we experienced the world.
It introduced us to one of the most fascinating discoveries in recent memory, the discovery of cells in the brain called mirror neurons. This discovery so captured the imagination of many people that it led to intense speculation; both scientists and non-scientists drawing conclusions before the science could catch up with our yearning for answers. I felt if the discovery hadn’t been made, someone would have had to make it up. As a result, attacks on the science began, and the whole subject went from the bright lights of headlines to the darkness of doubt and anger.
In the 1990s, a group of Italian scientists led by Giacomo Rizzolatti, at the University of Parma, discovered something weird. They were studying monkey behavior. When a monkey noticed an object, or interacted with it, for example reaching out their hand to grasp a peanut, certain sets of neurons fired. These same neurons also fired when the monkey watched other monkeys doing the same thing. In other words, they were understanding what the other was doing through having their own neurons fire as if they were doing it. They were “reading the other’s mind” by modeling themselves doing the action. Ramachandran described these neurons as virtual reality simulators provided by nature to help us understand the intention of others. They were natural empathy generators.
One of my students asked, if we can so model the actions of others, how come we don’t repeat them? Why don’t we constantly walk around imitating others? Of course, sometimes we do. For many of us, if we see a task performed, we can repeat it. We learn by imitating, even mimicking. But we have inhibitory cells in our skin, joints, frontal lobes and elsewhere that can reduce the mirroring effect.
Other students asked another important question: If we have mirror neurons, how can there be so much violence in the world, so much misunderstanding, hate, and anger?
If our minds can help us understand other people, they can also use our beliefs and assumptions to distort our mirrors of them. We know this; we’re so strongly influenced by others, not only by seeing what they do, but by language, culture, and social systems. When in a group, we’re more easily swayed to do something we normally would never do.
Ramachandran asks us to imagine how orangutans, who also have mirror neurons, swing beautifully through trees. They see a branch and their mirror neurons reproduce what they see. Their imagination says, “I can grasp that” and it does as it imagined. A section in the back of the brain acts as a crossroad between the mirror neuron systems in the visual (occipital), touch (parietal), and hearing (temporal) brain centers.
Likewise, we humans can stand on a baseball field in a batter’s box with a bat and watch a baseball come at us and know if or when to swing. The mirror neurons help calculate the path of the thrown ball.
Mirror neurons not only provide pathways for empathy, but for human thought and consciousness. We use the expression “self-reflection;” or self-mirroring. We not only mirror in our mind what others do; we mirror what we do. We don’t always like it, as when we feel guilt or regret when imagining how others might mirror or interpret what we’ve done. But when we look at ourselves as if we were someone else looking, or we look with a larger perspective than just the enclosure of our ego, we can better refine our thinking.
The universe includes a deep realm of interdependent awareness. How we treat others mirrors how we treat ourselves. As we walk through the world, we’re always mirroring what and who is around us. When we speak, we’re not just ourselves as speaker but the other(s) we’re speaking to. We often even speak to ourselves as if we were both speaker and listener.
Ramachandran calls the mirror cells “the neurons that shaped civilization,” or made civilization possible. Maybe if we spent a portion of each day mindfully studying how the cells worked in ourselves, we’d be better able to help save or re-shape civilization into something more just and compassionate.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
