Bruce Hood - The Self Illusion

In humans, not only do we learn from others about the world around us, we also learn to become a self. In the process of watching others and trying to understand them, we come to discover who we are. During these formative years, the illusion of the reflected self we experience is constructed by those around us through our social interactions.

On the Face of It

Brains got bigger as a way of coping with the processing demands of increasing group size. You need big brains to think about people so that you can negotiate the best path through the social landscape. You have to be cunning and that requires the ability to anticipate what others are thinking. In order to be a successful Machiavellian primate, 5as another famous Italian, Don Corleone, would say, ‘You need to keep your friends close but your enemies closer still.’ In other words, you have to be vigilant for those who wish to take advantage of you.

One of the first things you need to do is identify important individuals in the group. You have to be choosey. It’s no good trying to apply the same interactions to everyone. Imagine the problems you would create if you were a sexually active male, and could not distinguish between your mother, sister and your girlfriend when it came to sexual advances. It is important from an evolutionary point of view (not to mention social cohesion) to distinguish between individuals and one of the most important ways humans identify others is to rely on the uniqueness of faces.

Faces are an unusual class of patterns because they all share the same basic structure of two eyes, a nose and a mouth. Yet despite the similarity, the average human can recognize thousands of separate faces. This facial expertise is supported by neuronal circuitry in a region known as the fusiform gyrus, a cortical region located just behind your ears. 6It is active when we look at faces, and if you are unfortunate enough to have this area damaged (especially on the left side), then you may suffer from a condition known as prosopagnosia, a kind of face-blindness. Prosopagnosics can no longer tell faces apart and fail to recognize those that were once very familiar.

Our love of faces begins very early. Like Lorenz’s goslings that followed the first moving thing they saw, human newborns have built-in brain circuitry for following faces. 7Even though their vision is bad enough to qualify them as legally blind, faces are like magnets to young babies. They can hardly take their eyes off a human face even if it is just a rudimentary pattern made up of two dots for eyes and a third for a mouth. This initial preference for face-like patterns is quickly replaced by a system that learns to recognize specific faces. By six months, if you show infants a face they have never seen before, they easily remember it much later. They are learning who’s who. But it’s not just human faces. Six-month-old infants recognize both human and monkey faces. However, by nine months, babies lose the ability to tell the difference between monkey faces much as we do as adults. 8It’s another example of a sensitive period with brain plasticity that becomes increasingly tuned in to experience. What is remarkable (but not if we remember that we, too, are primates) is that baby monkeys also seek out any face, either monkey or human, but become more tuned into those to which they are exposed. We know this from studies of monkeys raised without seeing faces in laboratories where the human handlers wore blank masks to cover their faces. 9If monkeys never see faces, they lose the ability to tell any faces apart. If they see only human faces, they get good at telling humans apart. This selective responding to faces is another example of the ‘use it or lose it’ principle, in which the neural networks are tuning into early experiences to create a permanent record.

Early face experience also shapes human brains. For example, children born with cataracts never see faces clearly as infants. When their vision is surgically corrected later in life, they still have problems with recognizing faces even though they can then see clearly. 10No matter how much training and practice you have later in life, some early exposures are important for shaping brain development. So when Tarzan returned from the jungle to take up his position as Lord Greystoke, he would have had a problem telling the difference between the cook and the scullery maid, having never seen a human face as an infant. His recognition for ape faces at the zoo, on the other hand, would have been just fine.

The same goes for telling the difference between individuals from another race. Unlike most adults who think members of other ethnic groups look very similar, babies initially have no problem. They can tell everyone apart. It is only after exposure to lots of faces from the same race that our discrimination kicks in. However, you can train babies not to become tuned into their own race if you keep exposing them to faces from other races. 11So the next time you think that other races all look alike, don’t worry, it isn’t racism – it’s your lack of brain plasticity.

Smile and the World Smiles with You

Brain development requires more than just mere exposure. Having found a face as a newborn, what do you then do? As human infants are born so immature, they cannot waddle towards our mothers like birds can for at least another ten months or so. Yet it would appear that young babies are naturally inclined to get a rise out of adults by copying them – or at least responding in a way that adults think is an attempt to imitate. That’s right, if you stick your tongue out at a newborn baby, sometimes they will stick their tongue out right back at you. 12Even baby monkeys do this. 13It’s not the same as bratty children in the rear window of a bus giving you the finger or pulling facial grimaces, but if you wait patiently, a newborn may try to copy your expression. The reason that this is so remarkable is that it means humans enter the world ready for social interaction.

After tongues, comes the smiling. By two months, most infants will readily and spontaneously smile at adults. This is a magical moment for any parent. Brain imaging studies reveal when mothers look at pictures of their own smiling baby in comparison to those of other babies, the circuits in the reward centres deep in their brain known as the nucleus accumbens light up. 14These are the same circuits that get turned on by flowers, chocolate, orgasms and winning the lottery. No wonder social smiling is considered intensely pleasurable.

I vividly remember my own utter surprise and joy when my eldest daughter smiled at me for the first time. It wasn’t so much a smile but a burst of laughter and giggling (she has been laughing at me ever since). Even as an expert on infant behaviour who knew that social smiling can be expected around this time, nothing could prepare me emotionally for my daughter’s first smile which thrilled me and sent me hurrying off to tell anyone who would listen. In some cultures, such as the Navajo of North America, this first social smile of a newborn is a time of celebration and the person who sees this is considered enriched and should hand out gifts to all members of the family. They say the individual has arrived in the tribe. 15

With a simple pull of twelve facial muscles, our Machiavellian baby can control the adults around them with a smile. When babies smile at us, we smile back and it feels great! 16This is because smiling triggers the corresponding happy feelings in the emotional centres of our brain that are usually associated with this facial expression. Even forcing a smile by getting someone to bite down on a sideways pencil makes them happier than if they are asked to suck the pencil, which makes them pout. 17Copying each other’s expressions makes us feel differently, which is one reason why emotions can become almost contagious between people. In fact, we tend to only smile when there are others around. In one study, players in a tenpin bowling alley were found to smile only 4% of the time after a good score if they were facing away from their friends but this increased to 42% when they turned round to face them, indicating that this expression is primarily a signal to others 18.