Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect (22 page)

Making the Social World Possible

The
why-how
studies tell us a great deal about what the mirror system does and does not do with respect to mindreading.
The mirror system does not generate high-level mindreading on its own.
It does not invoke personality or motives to explain why someone would engage in a particular behavior like drinking a glass of single malt scotch at 8 a.m.
It is the mentalizing system that is critical in generating satisfying answers when we want to know why someone is doing something.

However, the mirror system does something that is an essential precursor to mentalizing in most everyday contexts.
Being able to see a series of body movements as a coherent coordinated action that can be characterized in a few words is a remarkable achievement of the brain.
William James famously noted how impressive it is that we see an orderly world of objects rather than a
“blooming, buzzing confusion.”
Given that nothing in the world unambiguously tells us where one object ends and another begins (“Is that a table with a separate mug sitting on top, or is that a table with a mug-shaped protrusion?”), it is striking how easily we do this.
Seeing the world of sentient beings in terms of their actions instead of their movements is equally impressive.

Every movement we see could be described with a nearly endless array of motion parameters (angles, direction, torque, acceleration), but these would be impossible to consciously comprehend together and wouldn’t tell us anything about the mind behind the movements.
It is only by synthesizing the complexity of movement into the simplicity of an action that any psychological analysis of
another’s goals, intentions, desires, and fears can begin.
Movements are not psychological and imply no specific meaning (for example, moving fingers up and down).
In contrast, actions are psychological (for example, typing), and although they do not provide high-level meanings in and of themselves, they suggest there are meanings and motives hiding behind them, waiting to be discovered.
The ability to identify
what
someone is doing is the first step toward being able to understand
why
.
In essence, the mirror system provides the premises that the mentalizing system can then logically operate in in order to answer the
why
question.
Thanks to the mirror system, we live in a world of actions, not movements, which allows us to live in a world of meaning.

In the end, the mirror system is what allows us to experience the world as social, full of the psychologically infused behavior of others.
Although our mentalizing system can mindread from written sentences without the aid of the mirror system, mindreading based on words is a recent event in our evolutionary history.
In the course of ordinary life and certainly in the development of pre-linguistic children, the mirror system is constantly doing the work of preparing the brain for mindreading.
The mirror system chops the world of living movement into pieces, and it repackages them into the psychological elements that the mentalizing system can work from.
This process is understated—like a chief of staff who mostly works in the background but makes the president’s work possible.
Primates have long had the mirror system, but only humans appear to have an advanced mentalizing system.
Primates live in a world of
what
others are doing, but only humans live in a world of
why
, with the rich meanings and interpretations to explain the actions of those around us.

CHAPTER 7
Peaks and Valleys

I
n 1992, I graduated from college on top of the world, with great friends, admission to an excellent PhD program, and a three-year romantic relationship that was going strong.
Just months later, I was living alone in a dorm room wondering how everything had gone so wrong so fast.
The transition to graduate school was not an easy one for me.
I was waiting for my advisors to figure out that I was an admissions error—all the other graduate students seemed much smarter and more productive than I was.
I had no real friends to speak of yet in grad school; I avoided going to the dining hall for weeks at a time because I didn’t fit in with the other graduate students in my dorm.
To top it off, my relationship was on the rocks, and I was broke.
It was easily one of the most depressing periods of my life.
I coped, if one can call it that, by watching hour after hour of reruns and infomercials on television.
Star Trek Next Generation
marathon until 4 a.m.?
I’m there.
The George Foreman Grill infomercial again?
Keep watching.

It was on one of these sad, lonely nights that a half-hour program came on about donating money to improve the life of a young child in Africa, who would otherwise starve to death or die of preventable diseases.
You have probably seen countless versions of these, and I had too.
But for some reason, that night, I found myself nearly in tears calling to make a donation in the middle of the night.
As unhappy and broke as I was, something about the images I saw moved me to try to do something potentially helpful for a stranger half a
world away.
The suffering of those children momentarily broke me out of my ongoing self-pity about my life and allowed me to feel empathy for people who clearly had it far worse than I did.

On the face of it, my behavior was irrational.
I needed more money, not less.
I had never met and would never meet the people I was supposedly helping, and they were never going to thank or repay me.
I never told anyone about making the donation.
I also don’t remember feeling anything pleasurable or rewarding about the experience or having thoughts about what a good person I was being.
Given that I did it only once and did not renew the donation the next year, I don’t take this episode as much evidence for my virtue.
When I go back to that moment, I can only say I felt compelled to do it.
My feelings of empathy compelled me to right that wrong in whatever small way that I could.

I Feel Your Pain

The word
empathy
was introduced into the English language
just over a century ago as a translation of the German word
einfühlung
, which means “feeling into.”
Einfühlung
was used in nineteenth-century aesthetic philosophy to describe our capacity to mentally get inside works of art and even nature itself, to have
something like a first-person experience from the object’s perspective
.
Empathy
still means something like “feeling into,” but it almost always refers to our connecting with another person’s experience, rather than “getting inside” an object.

We have already discussed how helping others produces feelings of social reward as a consequence.
However, empathy is a more complex process that serves to get us ready to help others.
Empathy is a front-end process that motivates us, whereas the social rewards are the back-end consequences.

There are at least three kinds of psychological processes
that come together to produce the empathic state:
mindreading, affect
matching
, and
empathic motivation
.
Depending on the situation, either our mirror or our mentalizing system provides the inputs that set the empathic state in motion.
As we discussed in
Chapter 6
, the mirror system allows us to understand observed actions as psychological events and may similarly allow us to understand emotional events when the visual scene provides a direct interpretation of what is going on.
One way we know the mirror system is sensitive to emotional cues from others is that we tend to literally mirror them, producing motor responses consistent with the other person’s experience.

For instance, when you see someone else getting a shock applied to her forearm, you are likely to clench your own fist and wince at the pain.
In one study,
individuals watched others receive shocks to their hands or feet
.
The observers produced electrical responses in their own hands or feet, mirroring what they saw.
When they saw someone’s hand shocked, their brain sent a signal to their own hand, but when they saw someone’s foot shocked, their brain sent a signal there instead.
Similarly, when we see another person’s emotional expression,
muscles in our own faces immediately mimic the expression in subtle ways
.
And
if a person is unable to mimic those facial expressions
because of recent Botox injections that actually paralyze the expressive muscles in the face, that person will actually be worse at recognizing emotions in others.

Thus, the imitative responses we have when we see other people’s emotions actually help us to instantly understand those experiences.
Given that the mirror system is involved in understanding
the psychological meaning of other people’s movements and is involved in imitating them, it is not surprising that the mirror system has been implicated in studies of empathy and emotional imitation.

Sometimes seeing someone’s emotional expression doesn’t allow us to fully understand a person’s experience and empathize with it.
Imagine someone walks toward you beaming with a giant smile.
Your mirror system may help you intuitively understand
what
that person is feeling, but without knowing
why
the person is feeling that
way, it is difficult to empathize and share in the joy.
Is that smile the result of getting a good grade on an exam or getting engaged?
In many situations,
trying to understand why someone is experiencing a particular emotion
ultimately depends on the mentalizing system.
Because of the flexibility of the mentalizing system, humans are capable of empathizing with events they have not observed or experienced themselves.
Your mother might tell you that your uncle didn’t get the promotion he was hoping for.
The mentalizing system is likely the key to understanding your uncle’s experience or even the “experience” of a character in a novel.
Indeed, those who read fiction tend to have stronger mentalizing abilities, suggesting that engaging with fictional minds may strengthen this system.

Whether our understanding of the other person’s experience is coming through the mirror system, the mentalizing system, or both, this is still only one piece of the puzzle, not the full empathic state.
I can imitate without feeling.
I can understand without feeling.
I can understand the dread a dictator must feel as his hold on power is crumbling, but my understanding is more likely to promote schadenfreude—the pleasure that results from seeing the misfortune of another—rather than empathy.
Empathy really only occurs when the information our brains have gathered via the mirror or mentalizing system leads to affect matching and empathic motivation.

Researchers examining the neuroscience of empathy have spent a lot of effort studying the affect matching component of empathy.
Indeed, it was the most famous neuroscience study of empathy that put affect matching on the map.
Tania Singer, then working at the University College of London, ran an empathy study that closely mimicked the original mirror neuron studies run in monkeys.
But instead of looking at the neural responses when someone reaches for a peanut or sees someone else do it, Singer examined the brains of people receiving an electric shock or watching someone else receive it.
She asked women to lie in the scanner while their boyfriends sat nearby outside the scanner.
On different trials of the study, either
the woman inside the scanner or her boyfriend outside the scanner was shocked using electrodes that were attached to their arms.
The woman could see her boyfriend’s arm as shocks were delivered to him.
As in mirror neuron studies, Singer and her colleagues looked for regions of the brain that were activated both when the women received painful shocks and when they saw their significant others being shocked in the same manner.

Singer found that the women activated the
pain distress network
in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) and the anterior insula regions of the brain (see
Figure 3.2
) regardless of who was receiving painful stimulation.
These women could say to their boyfriends with a straight face, “I feel your pain.”
People have made claims of empathy throughout history, but it has never been clear whether these have been more than social gestures.
Singer demonstrated that it may literally be painful to watch a loved one feel pain.
And not just metaphorically painful, but painful in a way similar to feeling one’s own physical pain.

Our Better Angels

Affect matching is an extraordinary capacity that can shake our very being, but on its own, it is still not the full state of empathy.
The neuroscience of empathy has focused mostly on the neural bases of affect matching for pain distress.
This is a natural place to start, given that we have such strong reactions to the pain of others.
However, all the focus on empathy for pain has brought with it some limitations as well.

First, affect matching when we see someone in pain does not always lead to prosocial empathic responses.
At the opening of the chapter, I described how I was moved to donate money to help disadvantaged children in Africa.
What I didn’t mention were the countless times that I had previously seen similar ads and changed the channel because it was too distressing.
Even though I was affect
matching (that is, their distress caused me to feel distress), my focus was on how to alleviate my own distress, rather than theirs.
In other words,
affect matching can sometimes lead to avoidance behavior
rather than the empathic motivation to help.
The same distress network in the brain would likely be activated whether I was focusing on my distress or theirs.
It is generally agreed that
empathy occurs only when there is an appropriate emotional response
(that is, affect matching) combined with a sustained focus on the other person’s situation, rather than our own.
So there is more to empathy than just affect matching.