J. S. had damaged the orbitofrontal cortex, a region of the frontal lobes that is adjacent to the jagged, bony ridges of the skull’s openings for the eyes. This region of the brain is often damaged in falls and bike and motorcycle accidents, as the brain jostles during the fall and is carved up by the bony backside of the eye sockets. This damage had left J. S.’s reasoning processes intact, but it had short-circuited his capacity for embarrassment. In actuality, he had lost something much larger: his ability to appease, reconcile, forgive, and participate in the social-moral order. More in-depth studies of this region of the brain would tell us what might have changed in Eadweard Muybridge the fateful day he was thrown headfirst into a tree.
MUYBRIDGE’S IMMODEST BRAIN
When Eadweard Muybridge regained consciousness after his injury, he felt strange. He had no sense of smell or taste. He had double vision. In his own muted words, he had “confused ideas.” Most likely those confused ideas centered upon a new disconnect to others, a sudden blindness to the rich web of conventions and subtle acts of cooperation that bind people to one another.
Like J. S., Muybridge had damaged his oribitofrontal cortex, which might be thought of as a command center for the moral sentiments. Anatomically, the orbitofrontal cortex receives information from the amygdala, a small, almond-shaped part of the midbrain, which provides a millisecond, unconscious assessment of whether objects are good or bad. It receives information from the cingulate cortex, which is involved in assessments of pain and harm. Soft, velvety touch to the arm activates the orbitofrontal cortex, suggesting that this portion of the brain tracks physical contact between people so central to the currency of gratitude and compassion and the formation of intimate and egalitarian bonds. It receives information from the vagus nerve, which is activated during our experience of compassion.
Remarkably, damage to the orbitofrontal cortex does not impair language, memory, or sensory processing, as Blair’s study of J. S. revealed. Patients who damage these regions speak with the fluency that would please any grammarian, and the cogence that would satisfy the most persnickety of logicians. Cold reason remains intact. But damage to the orbitofrontal cortex does tend to turn individuals into impulsive, everyday psychopaths.
We know this from case studies of people who have damaged that region of the brain. The most famous is Phineas Gage, who accidentally blew a thirteen-pound tamping rod through his skull while working on the Rutland and Burlington Rail Road in Vermont. The doctor who cared for Gage, John Harlow, offered one of the few recorded observations about Gage, who, prior to the accident, was uniformly considered a considerate, reliable, upstanding man: “He is fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity (which was not previously his custom), manifesting but little deference for his fellows, impatient of restraint or advice when it conflicts with his desires.”
In research with Jennifer Beer and Robert Knight on orbitofrontal patients, we sought to document that these patients, so skilled in the tasks of cold reasoning, have lost the art of embarrassment. They have lost the ability to appease, to reconcile, and signal their concern for others. In the study, our participants navigated a veritable obstacle course of embarrassing traps and hurdles. First, they disclosed personal experiences to a relative stranger—an exercise fraught with the possibility of being inappropriately intimate. Participants then teased an attractive female experimenter whom they had just met. They did so by making up a nickname and a provocative story for that person. Finally, patients were presented with slides of different facial expressions of emotions, including one of embarrassment—a trigger of reconciliation and forgiveness.
Our patients barreled through these tasks with the immodest impulse of the wild-eyed, street-corner psychopath. In the emotional disclosure task, comparison participants talked about being embarrassed at forgetting someone’s name or not understanding the punchline of a joke. Orbitofrontal patients, in contrast, recounted experiences that were often sexual and more suitable to a therapy session than an interaction with a stranger. They were unconstrained by the anticipation of embarrassment at having crossed the boundaries of intimacy. One patient’s account of embarrassment to his new acquaintance, the experimenter: “I was embarrassed when I was discovered in a store’s dressing room with my girlfriend.”
When teasing the stranger, the orbitofrontal patients did so in inappropriate and often lewd fashion. The nicknames they devised always contained sexual innuendo directed at the experimenter. One joked about what he and the experimenter might really get down to if given the chance. Unlike the comparison participants, the orbitofrontal patients showed no signs of embarrassment when teasing, even though their provocative efforts were often quite outlandish.
Finally, in judging the emotions of others, our orbitofrontal patients were inept at identifying embarrassment from photos, although they were quite skilled at judging other facial expressions, for example those of happiness, amusement, or surprise. They resembled psychopaths, who prove to be unresponsive to the signs of suffering in others.
Embarrassment warns us of immoral acts and prevents us from mistakes that unsettle social harmony. It signals our sense of wrongdoing and our respect for the judgments of others. It provokes ordinary acts of forgiveness and reconciliation, without which it would be a dog-eat-dog world. Orbitofrontal patients, fully capable in the realm of reason, have lost this art of embarrassment. They have lost the subtle ethic of modesty.
AN ETHIC OF MODESTY
Philosophers turn to metaphors to describe the moral sentiments, and those metaphors often center upon animating natural forces that unite humans in common cause. For the British Enlightenment philosophers, moral sentiments like sympathy made up an invisible force field, binding individuals to one another. For the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu, the Tao, or way of virtue, is like water, noncompetitive but touching all. Embarrassment is like an ocean wave: It throws you and those near you into the earth, but you come up embracing and laughing.
The simple elements of the embarrassment display I had documented and traced back to other species’ appeasement and reconciliation processes—the gaze aversion, head movements down, awkward smiles, and face touches—are a language of cooperation; they are the unspoken ethic of modesty. With these fleeting displays of deference, we preempt conflicts. We navigate conflict-laden situations (watch how regularly people display embarrassment when in close physical spaces, when negotiating the turn-taking of everyday conversations, or when sharing food). We express gratitude and appreciation. We quickly extricate embarrassed souls from their momentary predicaments with deflections of attention or face-saving parodies of the mishap.
Embarrassment is the foundation of an ethic of modesty. The display of embarrassment converts events that go into the denominator of the jen ratio (social gaffes, offensive remarks, violations of privacy) and transforms them into opportunities for reconciliation and forgiveness (experiences in the numerator of the jen ratio). It is in these in-the-moment acts of deference that we honor others, and in so doing, become strong. It is often when tender and weak that we are alive, and full of jen. In the words of Lao Tzu: