Drawing of Wilder Penfield’s sensory homunculus, showing areas that are elaborately supplied with sensation, such as the hand, lips, and tongue, enlarged to correspond to the large amount of sensory cortex devoted to them.
Feeling within the Self, Feeling for Others
Drawing of Wilder Penfield’s sensory homunculus, showing areas that are elaborately supplied with sensation, such as the hand, lips, and tongue, enlarged to correspond to the large amount of sensory cortex devoted to them.
Giacomo Rizzolatti and his team discovered mirror neurons, which are activated in monkeys when they see another individual doing an action and also when they do the same action themselves. Although controversies have arisen about the interpretation of functions of these neurons, the phenomenon of mirroring is established. It’s a component of human empathy. Tania Singer and colleagues have shown that some brain areas that are activated when a person is feeling pain are also activated when that person knows a loved one is in pain. Empathy has bases in the brain and in experience. We are not just selves, but selves-with-others.
Neurons and Their Activities
Among early findings of how brain makes mind were the terrible effects of damage reported by John Harlow from the accident suffered by Phineas Gage. Neuroscientists call damaged brain parts “lesions.” Sometimes in animals for purposes of research, and sometimes in humans for therapeutic purposes, for instance when there is a tumor, lesions are made deliberately, and groups of neurons are destroyed. This was the case with the modern Phineas Gages, studied by Antonio Damasio. Also, for the relief of intractable epilepsy that would spread from one side of the brain to the other, sometimes the neuronal tracts that join two hemispheres of the brain have been surgically cut. When this has occurred, the effects have enabled researchers to see something of the functions of each hemisphere. In most right-handed people, language depends on the left hemisphere, while spatial reasoning and non-verbal activities are more dependent on the right hemisphere.
In the eighteenth century, Luigi Galvani found that the leg of a dead frog could be made to kick when electricity was applied.1 It was a discussion of these effects that prompted the eighteen-year-old Mary Shelley on holiday in the Alps with her new husband, Percy Shelley, and some other friends, to form the idea of writing Frankenstein. In this novel, the researcher Victor Frankenstein uses electricity to bring to life a creature he has constructed from human body parts collected from charnel houses.
Following Galvani’s demonstrations it came to be recognized that the brain works, at least in part, by electricity. Consequently, a new method became available: stimulation with electrical currents. Studies conducted by Wilder Penfield and colleagues, of stimulation of groups of neurons of the human brain, for instance during surgical operations while the patient was under local anaesthetic but still conscious and able to report on effects, resulted in the discovery that the parts of the brain concerned with sensation are laid out in a kind of map of the human body, with the areas that are most important, the fingers and regions around the mouth, having more cortex assigned to them than areas such as the back. The amount of cortex associated with each body part has been drawn as a cartoon. It’s called the “sensory homunculus,” seen in the picture at the start of this chapter, with the size of each body part shown as larger or smaller according to how much sensory cortex is assigned to it. There is a comparable cartoon for the motor cortex.
In the twentieth century, with the new understandings of electronics that made radio broadcasting possible, another method became available. In addition to lesions and stimulation, it became possible to record the brain’s activities. At first electrical activity of large areas of the brain was recorded, averaging across billions of neurons. These recordings were ElectroEncephaloGrams (EEGs), and findings from them led to advances in our understanding of epilepsy.
Then, recordings of single neurons began. When the neuron’s activities are turned into sounds, researchers can hear the neurons firing: “click … click, click, click…. click click”; the faster the rate of firing, the more active the neuron. Among the most famous findings of this kind were that neurons of the visual region of the cortex of cats fired when little straight lines (line segments) were shown to the cat’s eyes, and that each neuron fired for lines in just one orientation: vertical, or horizontal, or various axes of oblique.2 These findings gave a clue as to why outline drawings are so effective for us in seeing objects.
In 1996, the report of recordings from single neurons that caused a big stir came from Parma, Italy, by Giacomo Rizzolatti and his team. When they recorded in an area involved in the control of action, in the brains of monkeys, they found some neurons that fired when the monkey saw a hand picking up a raisin, and also fired when the monkey itself did the action. They called these “mirror neurons.”
In a theoretical article, Vitorio Gallesi, with Rizzolatti and Christian Keysers, explain how mirror neurons enable us to take a step forward in our understanding of social cognition, the way we know other people. Think of it like this. If you see something happening in the physical world, perhaps a cloud moving across the sky, or a leaf dropping from a tree, you use your perceptual system to know what is happening. Cues on the retina pick up signs of movement, to which the visual system is attuned, and they connect with your knowledge of clouds or of leaves. You then project your understanding onto the input to the retina and see what is happening. When we see a fellow human rising from a chair or picking up a paper from a table, the same kind of process occurs in the visual system, but in addition something else happens. The part of your own brain that works the legs for you to rise from a chair, or the hand when you pick something up, is also brought into action, so that you get an intuition within yourself of standing up or picking up a paper.
Rizzolatti and his colleagues argue that empathy, in which one feels something that another person is feeling, is also based on a mirroring process. If we see someone make a facial expression of disgust, it has been found that we too feel disgusted. Areas of brain, which includes a region called the insula, are activated both in the person we observe and in ourselves. We don’t just analyze the facial expression, we know the emotion within ourselves by mirroring it.
In human participants, one cannot record directly from mirror neurons, so Giovanni Buccino and colleagues used a method called “transcranial magnetic stimulation,” which could be applied gently from outside the skull to parts of the motor cortex. When this stimulation was applied to an area of the motor cortex concerned with making hand movements, a movement occurred in the muscles of the hand. When applied to an area concerned with foot movement, muscles of the foot moved. Next the researchers gave their participants three-word sentences: “Suonava il piano” (“He played the piano,” as you may see in figure 18) or “Calciava la palla” (“He kicked the ball”). When a sentence about a hand movement was offered, the activity of the hand muscles in response to transcranial stimulation was reduced. A comparable result was found for sentences about the foot and movements of foot muscles. These reductions did not occur when participants listened to sentences that were not about hand or foot movements. The researchers argue that the reductions in response to the magnetic stimulation occurred because when the participants had listened to sentences about hand movements or foot movements, the areas of the brain concerned with these movements were already occupied.
This result may seem a bit indirect, but we can get closer to the brain’s secrets with a study by Nicole Speer and colleagues who trained twenty-eight people to read a story with words flashed one-by-one on a screen. This method was used to avoid eye movements that interfered with fMRI recording. After they had practiced, and were in the fMRI scanner, participants read four short stories, each of which took about ten minutes to read. The stories were about events in the day of a seven-year-old boy named Raymond.
When the story said, “Raymond laid down his pencil,” fMRI recordings showed that regions of the motor cortex concerned with picking up and putting down objects were activated. When a character changed location, regions in the frontal cortex were activated. Another finding was that when a character’s goal or intention changed, regions in readers’ superior temporal cortex (at the side of the brain) and in the prefrontal cortex were activated. It’s as if, to understand what someone says to us, or to understand what we read, we ourselves perform parts of these actions mentally, or we undergo for ourselves inner versions of changes that are referred to. It’s quite different from seeing a leaf drop from a tree.
Here I think we may be getting close to something that we could not have glimpsed without the methods of brain science. With the idea of mirror neurons, and with studies of transcranial stimulation, and of fMRI changes while reading, we glimpse how we create within us imagined actions and perceptions that can derive from words we are told, or words we read. To understand and imagine, we use parts of the brain that we would use if we ourselves were to act in a way that is verbally suggested, or if we were actually to see the kind of thing that is spoken about.
A study by Tania Singer and colleagues has become perhaps as famous as John Harlow’s paper on Phineas Gage. It was a study of empathy: a feeling that is similar to an emotion one sees, or imagines, another person to be feeling, while knowing the other person to be the source of the emotion. In their laboratory, the researchers recorded from the brains of sixteen women while a loved partner was sitting next to the scanner. Mirrors were arranged so that each woman in the scanner could see her partner. The researchers studied brain activity of each participant when she received an electric shock to the back of her right hand, and when pain of the same kind was applied to the back of the hand of her partner. In some parts of participants’ brains, activation occurred when they themselves received a shock. These sites mediated the physical basis of pain. But then, in other areas of the brain, activation occurred both when the participant received pain and when the participant received a signal that her loved one was receiving pain. These areas mediated an emotional aspect of pain.
In addition to her work in neuroscience, Tania Singer has been influential in economics. She has argued that “Research in the fields of psychology and neuroscience shows beyond doubt that the assumptions about human nature that underpin mainstream economic models are simply wrong.”3
The assumptions to which Singer refers are those that are central to economic theory: that humans act only in their own self-interest.4 Of course we humans are selfish—sometimes we can be very selfish—but, says Singer, to say that human economic activity is guided only by this selfishness is to mistake a part for the whole. We are also motivated to care about others, and to think about what they might want. Psychology and neuroscience have shown that other people are important to us and with more compassion, societies and their economies would become more cooperative and responsible. “If we are to address some of our most pressing global problems, such as climate change and inequality,” she says, “we need to devise new economic models that accommodate the real complexity of human nature.”5
One might go further. One might say that when economists argue that individual self-interest and exchange are what make the commercial world work, they have it backwards. We humans cooperate with each other. Exchange and industry, which provide the wherewithal for all of us, are a happy result of our cooperativeness.
In an extension of the study of Singer and her colleagues, Lane Beckes, James Coan, and Karen Hasselmo monitored the brains of people in an fMRI machine when they were threatened with an electrical shock, when a friend was threatened with the shock, or when a stranger was threatened. Certain areas of the brain were activated when the participants were threatened themselves. Almost identical areas were activated when the friend was threatened, but not when the stranger was threatened. The researchers say that these results mean that those whom we love become part of us, not just metaphorically, but in a physical sense. The researchers conclude that “from the perspective of the brain, our friends and loved ones are indeed part of who we are.”6
Researchers have tended to think of results of studies of the brain as being about the individual. But the findings of Singer, and of Beckes and colleagues, show this is not so. “Who we are” is seldom who we are on our own. “Who we are” is ourselves with others.
Ryszard Praskier has argued that mirror neurons enable people to synchronize their thoughts by means of empathetic relationships, and cites also a study in which children have been taught empathy, with positive results.7
The discovery of mirror neurons made an impact on how we think about the brain. It also evoked controversy. Among the claims are that mirror neurons offer a way to explain how we understand people and because some words can affect brain areas concerned with enacting their meanings, they may help to explain how language is based on processes of mirroring. Among arguments against such claims are that mirror neurons have been recorded only in monkeys, who don’t understand other minds and who don’t have language, and that there are people who have had strokes that have damaged motor areas of the brain (where mirror neurons are thought to be) who can still understand language.8
Although some proposals about the functions of mirror neurons are controversial, the phenomenon of mirroring is not. It happens when a parent smiles at a three-month-old baby, and the baby smiles back. In an experiment in which adult participants saw videos of people expressing happiness or anger while their own facial expressions were unobtrusively video-recorded, it was found that the people mirrored these expressions themselves, in a process that indicates both a component of inner recognition and a component of communication.9 This kind of mimicry seems to have been an essential step in the evolution of the human mind in its sociality.10
The existence of mirror neurons is an established finding, and their significance is still being understood. Together with the study of empathy of the kind begun by Singer, perhaps the most fundamental issue is that neuroscience and psychology have started to deal with something that has been ignored or overlooked. It is that we humans are not just individuals. For the most part, we are not very individual at all. We are us-with-our-loved-ones, us-who-hang-out-with-friends, us-who-work-with-colleagues. We take part in cultures. Even when we are alone, we often think of ourselves in relation to others.
Sociality
How do we understand others? One idea is that we use ourselves to simulate others’ minds. When we converse with someone, or consider an action another person has done, we often look into ourselves and imagine what we might think and feel in the other person’s situation. We project an understanding of our selves onto that person, and we correct for what we know of her or him (from our mental model of the person). The mind is a somewhat private place, without windows through which we can gaze when we look into someone’s eyes, so inference is necessary. The difficulty is that inference about other minds is indirect; it’s a kind of projection. It does not have the immediacy of the way in which we perceive a leaf falling. Ray Nickerson has put it like this: we tend to project too much and correct too little.
The film The Third Man is set in Vienna in the years after World War II, when the city was occupied by the Allies.11 Harry Lime, played by Orson Welles, has been stealing penicillin from a hospital and diluting it to increase its quantity, then selling it at a very high price. Diluted, it no longer works properly, so that young children to whom it is administered for treatment of meningitis are permanently brain-damaged. In one scene Lime, with his friend Holly Martins, is high up on Vienna’s big Ferris wheel. “Look down there,” says Lime. He points to people moving about on the ground, far enough below to seem like mere dots. “Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever?” he says. “If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped moving, would you tell me to keep my money?”
Holly Martins has liked Harry Lime, but as we watch the film we realize that Lime is a heinous man. He is without empathy. To reinforce his suggestion to Martins that he should turn Lime in, the British army officer, Major Calloway, who has been working on prosecuting Lime for his penicillin racket, takes Martins to a hospital to see some of the children who have been affected.
Empathy is just a part. The whole is that, among all the animals, we members of humankind are social. We are not just selves. We are selves-with-others.
