Bruce Hood - The Self Illusion

Many animals can copy but none do so for the pure joy of being sociable. Copying is not an automatic reflex. Babies do not slavishly duplicate every adult action they see. 70If the adult does not smile and get the babies’ attention from the start, then babies don’t copy. Also, babies only copy adults who seem to know what they are doing. Initially babies will copy the actions of an adult who is wearing a blindfold. The baby does not know that the adult cannot see. However, if you give the baby the blindfold to play with, then they don’t make the mistake of copying the blindfolded adult again. Babies know that they can’t possibly be looking at anything worth paying attention to. In other words, babies will only copy adults when they are led to think that something is worth doing. Babies will even copy robots that seem to behave socially. My colleague Shoji Itakura in Kyoto has shown that if a robot initially looks at an infant, then the infant will copy the robot’s actions. If the robot does not react socially to the child, it is ignored. By simply looking at the baby, the robot is assumed to have a purposeful mind worthy of attention. 71

Monkey See – Monkey Do

Have you ever wondered why you wince when you see someone else being punched? After all, it’s not you who is taking a beating, but you copy their reaction. Neuroscientists have been studying the neural basis of this social copying phenomenon following the discovery of brain cells, aptly named ‘mirror neurons’, that appear to fire in sympathy when watching other people’s actions. Mirror neurons can be found in the cortical regions of the brain towards the front and top of the head known as the supplementary motor area that is active during the planning and execution of movements.

The mirror neuron system was originally discovered by accident in the laboratories of the Italian neurophysiologist, Giacomo Rizzolatti, in the 1990s. 72I remember attending an early lecture given by Rizzolatti in which he explained how he and fellow researchers had implanted an electrode into the brain region of a monkey that controls movements to study the firing of neurons while the monkey reached to pick up a peanut. As predicted the neuron fired when the animal reached out to pick up the reward. But what they didn’t expect was that the same neuron also fired when the animal watched the human experimenter pick up the peanut. How could that be? This was a cell in the motor area of the monkey’s brain, not in the human’s brain. It was as if the cell was mirroring the behaviour of someone else. The monkey mirror neurons did not fire to just any movement of the human, but only to the actions that led to retrieving the peanut. The neuron seemed to know the experimenter’s goal. Whether mirror neurons are a distinct class of specialized neurons is still hotly debated, 73but they do appear to resonate with other people’s actions and therefore could reveal what is on other people’s minds.

The discovery of mirror neurons spread through the academic community like wildfire. Some likened their discovery as having the same impact in neuroscience as unravelling the structure of DNA had in biology. 74This was because mirror neurons seemed to provide a way of knowing other people’s goals and intentions. Mirror neurons operate like a direct link between minds in the same way that computers can be networked so that when I type a sentence on my laptop, it will appear on your screen. This possibility was a big leap forward for neuro-scientists working on how we establish that others have minds similar to our own.

If my mirror neurons fire when watching someone else’s actions, then because my actions are already linked to my own mind, I simply have to know what is on my mind to know what you are thinking. As we noted earlier, if you smile and I automatically smile back at you, this triggers happy thoughts in me as well as a good feeling. By mirroring your behaviour I can directly experience the emotional state that you are experiencing. When we mimic someone else’s expression with our own muscles, we can readily access the same emotion that is usually responsible for generating that expression. This may be why people who have their own facial muscles temporarily paralysed following a Botox injection to remove wrinkles are not as good at reading other people’s emotional expressions because they are unable to copy them. 75

Mirror neurons are part of the reason we enjoy watching movies and plays. When we watch others we can experience their emotions directly. When we empathize with the emotions of others, we feel their pain and joy. In a condition known as mirror-touch synaesthesia, individuals literally feel the pain of others. For example, they could not watch Raging Bull or other movies involving boxing. Brain imaging reveals that when these individuals watch other people, they have over-activation of the mirror system associated with touch. 76Another region lights up known as the anterior insula, which is active when we are making self versus other discriminations, so these individuals find it difficult to distinguish between what is happening to them compared to what is happening to someone else.

According to synaesthesia expert, Jamie Ward, just over one in a hundred have mirror-touch synaesthesia but many more of us have a milder experience when we wince watching someone being hurt. 77Other people’s emotional displays similarly trigger the same emotional circuits that are active during our own traumatic experiences. That’s why tearjerkers work. They plug straight into the same brain regions that are active in our heads when we feel sad. TV producers have known this for decades by using canned laughter to prompt the same response in viewers because laughter is emotionally contagious. We cannot help but smile when others do so. This effect is enhanced if the laughter is interspersed with the occasional shot of a studio audience member cracking up in hysterics.

Mirror neurons can also explain other aspects of social behaviour, including our tendency towards mimicry – that involuntary human behaviour in which we unconsciously duplicate another’s movements and actions. When people queue up, they space themselves out equally from each other and often adopt the same postures. People in rocking chairs unintentionally end up rocking in synchrony when they watch each other. 78During conversations, people will cross and uncross their limbs, nod their heads and mimic all manner of movements in synchronization with the other person, though it is worth noting that this depends on whether they like or agree with each other in the first place. This issue is discussed in more depth in Chapter 6 because it turns out that mimicry has important consequences on how we respond to others we consider to be like us or different.

What about yawning? Have you ever had that involuntary urge to yawn after watching someone else stretch open their mouth and bellow out that wail to slumber. Around half of us will yawn if we watch someone else yawning. No one is quite sure why we do this as a species. One theory is that it is a behaviour that helps to synchronize our biological clocks. However, a more intriguing possibility is that yawning is a form of emotional contagion – like a rapidly spreading disease, we catch the urge to copy others as a way of visibly bonding together. This may explain why contagious yawning is not present in young babies but develops somewhere between three and four years of age when children sharpen their awareness of others having thoughts. 79

And what about vomiting? Just the sight of someone else being sick can induce an involuntary gag in those around them – in the movie Stand By Me , there is some truth in Gordie’s campfire story about the ‘barf’o’rama’ where the protagonist, Lardass, induces mass vomiting in a crowd attending the village pie-eating competition. It is not just sights. In one survey to find which sound that people found the most horrible, the noise of someone vomiting was considered the most disgusting. 80Such emotional contagion would be a very useful way of learning important information from others about what’s safe to eat. After all, what we find disgusting can be shaped by what others around us think. It’s as if all of our systems, designed to pay attention to others, appear to be set up to resonate with what others are experiencing.