Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect (19 page)

Figure 5.4 The Director’s Task.
Left shows the participant’s view; the right shows the director’s view.
Adapted from Keysar, B., et al. (2000). Taking perspective in conversation.
Psychological Science
, 11(1), 32–38.

Notice there are three candles on different shelves within the grid, the smallest of which you can see but your partner cannot.
What should you do when your partner tells you
to move the “small candle”?
Iroise Dumontheil and Sarah-Jayne Blakemore asked young children, teenagers, and adults to perform this task.
When faced with the candle trials, the young children moved the wrong candle almost 80 percent of the time.
Typically, the children would move the smallest candle—that is, they would move a candle that their partner could not see and thus could not have been referring to.
Such behavior is egocentric because the children appear not to be considering their partner’s perspective and instead act as if their partner can see what they see.

Adults do much better than children in this task.
And they should, given that their mentalizing ability is much better developed.
However, adults do not do nearly as well as we might guess.
Most of us would imagine that it might take slightly longer to get the tricky trials right because there is more to consider, but we also believe that we would get these trials right nearly every time.
If you know your partner can’t see the smallest candle, why would you ever move that candle?
However, in Dumontheil and Blakemore’s study, the adults made mistakes on the tricky requests 45 percent of the time.
Yes, adults have the capacity to mentalize well, but as this study shows, they don’t apply this tendency reliably.
This is probably because the brain regions that support accurate mentalizing require effort to work well, and we are wired to be mental couch potatoes whenever we can get away with it.
We may mentalize a great deal, but that doesn’t mean we always do it well or that we can’t learn to do it better.

The Miracle of Mentalizing

Although we begin to gain the capacity to appreciate the differing beliefs and perspectives of others in our preschool years, even as adults we continue to use this capacity somewhat inefficiently.
Nevertheless, mentalizing is one of the signature achievements of the
human mind, one that separates us from all other species.
Along with our capacities for language and abstract thinking, mentalizing is the primary reason we live in homes with air-conditioning and communicate over tiny wireless devices.
No business, classroom, or friendship can thrive without this miraculous mental process.
Mentalizing allows us to imagine not only what other people are thinking or feeling right now but also how they would react to nearly any event in the future.
It even allows us to consider how their reactions would change as their development, interests, or circumstances change.

Apple cofounder Steve Jobs suggested that his own view on product design was much like that of Henry Ford, who famously said, “If I’d have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse.’”
The essence of successful inventing, Ford would say, is to figure out what people will want before it exists.
Steve Jobs was a master at understanding what we would want better than we could guess ourselves.
The iPod was declared dead on arrival when it was first announced in 2001.
By 2011, more than 300 million iPods had been sold, not counting the iPhones, iPads, and countless rival devices it inspired.
The idea of the iPod may not have been inspiring to most, but Steve Jobs bet the entire future of Apple on his belief that when other people experienced his products, they would love them.

In little ways, every day, we use mindreading to anticipate the desires and worries of the people in our lives and act to make their lives a bit better.
When we are lucky, they do the same for us.
Our ability to mentalize is the difference between social pain and pleasure being random occurrences and their being destinations that we can navigate toward or away from.

CHAPTER 6
Mirror, Mirror

A
friend of mine once joked that if he ever discovered he was living in a counterfeit world like Jim Carrey in the movie
The Truman Show
, his first response would be, “Airplanes!
How did I ever get tricked into believing 300-ton metal buses could actually fly?”
As impossible as it seems, planes take off and land uneventfully thousands of times a day.
Flying is one of the safest modes of travel, only slightly riskier than using Google Earth to see the world.
Of course, air travel wasn’t always so safe.
Flying through the air at hundreds of miles per hour means that any system failure has the potential for catastrophe, or at least it did until airplanes began being built with massive redundancy.
Engines, flight controls, and communications equipment are each duplicated within the same aircraft to ensure that if one fails, the plane will still reach its destination safely.
Flying is a high-stakes enterprise that is well worth the extra dollars to prevent fatal system failures.

Our ability to understand what is going on in the minds of others may not have the same life-or-death consequences as an airplane crash, but over the course of a lifetime, making sense of the thoughts and intentions of others can be the difference between increased happiness and social connection or escalating loneliness and frustration.
It might make sense, then, if evolution selected for brains with redundant systems for making sense of other people.

In this chapter, we examine a second neural system that has been associated with making sense of other people—one that has
a radically different architecture from the mentalizing system.
Unlike the mentalizing system, this second system is shared by humans and other primates.
Various claims have been made about the two systems regarding which is superior for making sense of others.
As often happens in science, defenders of each system tend to study their preferred system under conditions that maximize what can be attributed to that system and minimize the apparent contributions of the other system.
In reality, the two systems perform different jobs that are most often complementary, each critical to making us the massively social creatures that we are.
Both help us make sense of the ordinary actions of others every day.
Both are vital in allowing us to empathize with others and experience compassion for their misfortune.
And both are aberrant in autism, a condition that leaves individuals unable to understand the minds of others easily and thus less able to form and maintain important social bonds.

Monkey See, Monkey Do

Giacomo Rizzolatti at the University of Parma in Italy specializes in primate neurophysiology.
Throughout the 1980s, his lab was focused on examining how individual neurons in macaque monkeys responded when a monkey performed an action.
Some neurons in the premotor cortex would respond selectively when the monkey grasped an object with its hand.
Other neurons responded when the monkey put an object in its mouth.
Some neurons responded to the sight of an object
that could be grasped, even if it was not being grasped at the moment, while other neurons did not respond to the sight of the object unless the monkey was acting on the object.
In other words, primates have a lot of different neurons responsible for different functions related to performing even the simplest action.

While conducting one of these studies, the researchers noticed something unexpected.
Their serendipitous discovery has, to many minds,
changed our fundamental understanding of how we came to be such social creatures
.
Some of the same neurons that responded when, say, a monkey grabbed a peanut with its hand also responded when the monkey watched the scientist grab a peanut.
These neurons did not respond to the sight of the peanut alone, in the absence of action directed at the peanut.
And they did not respond to the sight of the experimenter pretending to pick up a peanut when there was no peanut there.

These results were startling because neuroscientists had thought of the brain as being divided into different sections for perceiving, thinking, and acting.
But in these
mirror neurons
, perception and action were occurring in the same exact neuron.
Picking up a peanut and seeing another person picking up a peanut had the same effect on these neurons.
Although some psychologists had argued for this kind of perceptual-motor
overlap before, it was a revelation to most.
The neurons that responded to action weren’t supposed to be involved in perception.
But Rizzolatti’s work suggested these neurons might be.

The excitement over the discovery of mirror neurons grew in such a way that they quickly became the solution du jour for many of the hardest problems within psychology.
Championing this perspective, renowned neuroscientist V.
S.
Ramachandran wrote that mirror neurons are “the single most important … story of the decade” and argued that “mirror neurons will do for psychology what DNA did for biology: they will provide a unifying framework and help explain a host of mental abilities
that hitherto remained mysterious and inaccessible to experiments.”
Indeed, as he predicted, a long list of mental phenomena have been attributed to mirror neurons since their discovery, including
our capacity for language, culture, imitation, mindreading, and empathy
.
That’s pretty heady stuff—a single neuron explaining all of these miracles of humanity.

Exciting new discoveries in science often go through a Hegelian three-step waltz, starting with the promise that the discovery will account for 100 percent of the unexplained phenomena (phase I: thesis), followed by loss of faith that the discovery explains much of
anything (phase II: antithesis), and eventually settling into a realistic appreciation of what the discovery does and does not contribute (phase III: synthesis).
Mirror neurons are probably somewhere between phases I and II today; they are still promoted as something of a cure-all in some corners, but they also have a growing chorus of vocal detractors.
I personally began more in this second camp, but I think I will end up most comfortable when phase III is in full swing.
Ultimately, I think mirror neurons do two very important things.
First, mirror neurons play an important role in our ability to imitate others.
Second, mirror neurons do something essential that allows mindreading to occur, but I believe it is more of a behind-the-scenes role than is generally understood.

Imitation

The human brain reached its modern size around 200,000 years ago, and yet there is little evidence of advanced culture (for example, complex tools, language, religion, or art) prior to 50,000 years ago.
It has been suggested that some minor genetic change around that time served to push us over a tipping point, creating a cascade of self-reinforcing cultural development.
Some have argued that this genetic change enhanced our working memory system,
allowing us to keep more abstract ideas in mind at the same time
.
Ramachandran has countered that a genetic change affecting mirror neurons may have accelerated our development, characterizing this change as “the driving
force behind the ‘great leap forward’ in human evolution.”

Our cultural development of skills and habits depends on our capacity for imitation.
Given that mirror neurons respond during both action and perception of an action, promoting the fine-tuning of one’s own actions in light of what is seen, they seem like an ideal mechanism to support imitation and imitation-based learning.
Especially in a prelinguistic society, the ability to learn through imitation is likely to be the chief method of spreading innovation from
person to person, and from generation to generation.
Minor innovations to any procedure such as hunting or creating shelter can be passed on to others, who can add further innovation in a beneficent spiral.
Were mirror neurons the original social media—a way to share what we knew before we were able to say it out loud, send tweets, or post status updates to the cloud?
Increasingly, the answer looks to be yes; mirror neurons seem to play a key role in imitation.

In 1999, my colleague Marco Iacoboni published the
first evidence regarding the presence of a mirror neuron system in humans
.
Rather than focusing on action and observation, like the prior work in monkeys, Iacoboni focused on observation and imitation.
Individuals in his study were shown visual displays of finger movements while being brain-scanned, and they were asked to either watch the images or imitate them.
Iacoboni found that regions similar to those Rizzolatti had seen in monkeys were active during both observation and imitation in humans.
This suggests that these regions in the lateral frontal and parietal areas (see
Figure 6.1
) have mirror properties similar to those observed in mirror
neurons
in monkeys.
Because fMRI does not look at individual neuronal activity, studies like this one cannot claim to have found mirror neurons per se in humans.
Thus these regions, specifically the premotor cortex in the frontal lobe along with the anterior intraparietal sulcus and the inferior parietal lobule, are often referred to as the
mirror system
, not the “mirror neuron system,” in humans.
Note that while the mirror system and the working memory system both reside in the lateral frontal and parietal cortices, they are actually in different locations within these regions.