Mirroring People (Hardcover)

 

“This book vividly conveys the current excitement in the field of mirror neurons and it should provide a valuable antidote to "Neuron envy" - a widely prevalent syndrome in psychology. The author explores the broader implications of the research for understanding the neural basis of human nature.”   —V.S. Ramachandran, M.D., PhD,  Director, Center for brain and cognition, UCSD

Marco Iacoboni is a neurologist and neuroscientist at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. He has appeared on Good Morning America, the Early Show, and Morning Edition, among other TV and radio programs.

Excerpt

NEURO THIS!

When we get right down to it, what do we human beings do all day long? We read the world, especially the people we encounter. My face in the mirror first thing in the morning doesn’t look too good, but the face beside me in the mirror tells me that my lovely wife is off to a good start. One glance at my eleven-year-old daughter at the breakfast table tells me to tread carefully and sip my espresso in silence. When a colleague reaches for a wrench in the laboratory, I know he’s going to work on the magnetic stimulation machine, and he’s not going to throw his tool against the wall in anger. When another colleague walks in with a grin or a smirk on her face—the line can be fine indeed, the product of tiny differences in the way we set our face muscles—I automatically and almost instantaneously can discern which it is. We all make dozens—hundreds—of such distinctions every day. It is, quite literally, what we do.

Nor do we give any of this a second thought. It all seems so ordinary. However, it is actually extraordinary—and extraordinary that it feels ordinary! For centuries, philosophers scratched their heads over humans’ ability to understand one another. Their befuddlement was reasonable: they had essentially no science to work with. For the past 150 years or so, psychologists, cognitive scientists, and neuroscientists have had some science to work with—and in the past fifty years, a lot of science—and for a long time they continued to scratch their heads. No one could begin to explain how it is that we know what others are doing, thinking, and feeling.

Now we can. We achieve our very subtle understanding of other people thanks to certain collections of special cells in the brain called mirror neurons. These are the tiny miracles that get us through the day. They are at the heart of how we navigate through our lives. They bind us with each other, mentally and emotionally.

Why do we give ourselves over to emotion during the carefully crafted, heartrending scenes in certain movies? Because mirror neurons in our brains re-create for us the distress we see on the screen. We have empathy for the fictional characters—we know how they’re feeling—because we literally experience the same feelings ourselves. And when we watch the movie stars kiss on-screen? Some of the cells firing in our brain are the same ones that fire when we kiss our lovers. “Vicarious” is not a strong enough word to describe the effect of these mirror neurons. When we see someone else suffering or in pain, mirror neurons help us to read her or his facial expression and actually make us feel the suffering or the pain of the other person. These moments, I will argue, are the foundation of empathy and possibly of morality, a morality that is deeply rooted in our biology. Do you watch sports on television? If so, you must have noticed the many “reaction shots” in the stands: the fan frozen with anticipation, the fan ecstatic over the play. (This is especially true for baseball broadcasts, with all the downtime between pitches.) These shots are effective television because our mirror neurons make sure that by seeing these emotions, we share them. To see the athletes perform is to perform ourselves. Some of the same neurons that fire when we watch a player catch a ball also fire when we catch a ball ourselves. It is as if by watching, we are also playing the game. We understand the players’ actions because we have a template in our brains for that action, a template based on our own movements. Since different actions share similar movement properties and activate similar muscles, we don’t have to be skilled players to “mirror” the athletes in our brain. The mirror neurons of a non-tennis-playing fan will fire when watching a pro smash an overhead, because the non-tennis-playing fan has certainly made other kinds of overhead movements with his arm throughout his life; the equivalent neurons of a fan such as me, who also plays the game, will obviously be activated much more strongly. And if I’m watching Roger Federer, I bet my mirror neurons must be firing wildly, because I’m a big Federer fan.

Mirror neurons undoubtedly provide, for the first time in history, a plausible neurophysiological explanation for complex forms of social cognition and interaction. By helping us recognize the actions of other people, mirror neurons also help us to recognize and understand the deepest motives behind those actions, the intentions of other individuals. The empirical study of intention has always been considered almost impossible, because intentions were deemed too “mental” to be studied with empirical tools. How do we even know that other people have mental states similar to our own? Philosophers have mulled over this “problem of other minds” for centuries, with very little progress. Now they have some real science to work with. Research on mirror neurons gives them and everyone interested in how we understand one another some remarkable food for thought.

Consider the teacup experiment I dreamed up some years back, which I’ll discuss in considerable detail later. The test subjects are shown three video clips involving the same simple action: a hand grasping a teacup. In one, there is no context for the action, just the hand and the cup. In another, the subjects see a messy table, complete with cookie crumbs and dirty napkins—the aftermath of a tea party, clearly. The third video shows a neatly organized tabletop, in apparent preparation for the tea party. In all three video clips, a hand reaches in to pick up the teacup. Nothing else happens, so the grasping action observed by the subjects in the experiment is exactly the same. The only difference is the context.

Do mirror neurons in the brains of our subjects note the difference in the contexts? Yes. When the subject is observing the grasping scene with no context at all, mirror neurons are the least active. They are more active when the subject is watching either of the scenes and most active when watching the neat scene. Why? Because drinking is a much more fundamental intention for us than is cleaning up. The teacup experiment is now well known in the field of neuroscience, but it is not an isolated result: solid empirical evidence suggests that our brains are capable of mirroring the deepest aspects of the minds of others—intention is definitely one such aspect—at the fine-grained level of a single brain cell. This is utterly remarkable. Equally remarkable is the effortlessness of this simulation. We do not have to draw complex inferences or run complicated algorithms. Instead, we use mirror neurons.

Looking at the issue from another perspective, labs around the world are accumulating evidence that social deficits, such as those associated with autism, may be due to a primary dysfunction of mirror neurons. I hypothesize that mirror neurons may also be very important in imitative violence induced by media violence, and we have preliminary evidence suggesting that mirror neurons are important in various forms of social identification, including “branding” and affiliation with a political party. Have you heard of neuroethics, neuromarketing, neuropolitics? You will in the years and decades to come, and research in these fields will be rooted, explicitly or otherwise, in the functions of mirror neurons.

This book tells the story of the serendipitous and groundbreaking discovery of this special class of brain cells, the remarkable advances in the field in just twenty years, and the extremely clever experiments now under way in several labs around the world. Quite simply, I believe this wo