Others were more sceptical because recording directly from neurons in the brain of a human had not been done. However, in 2010, neurosurgeon Itzhak Fried published a study13 of patients he had been treating for epilepsy. To isolate the affected brain region, he implanted electrodes to determine which areas to surgically remove – much in the same way that Wilder Penfield had done all those years earlier with his neurosurgery patients. During this procedure, the patients were fully conscious and able to take part in a study designed to establish the presence of mirror neurons once and for all. They were asked to either smile, frown, pinch their index finger and thumb together or make a whole grip with their hand. When Fried found neurons that were activated during one of these movements, the patients were then shown a video of someone else making the same types of movements. Just as in the macaque monkey, premotor neurons were activated both by making a movement and also by watching someone else perform exactly the same action – bona fide mirror neurons in humans. The real burning question is how did they get there?14 Are they simply neurons that have acquired their dual activity after years of watching others and mapping their behaviour to one’s own movements? Or are babies already prepackaged with mirror neurons, which might explain reports where newborns have been shown to copy adult facial expressions without any learning?
The ‘in’ crowd
As we read in Chapter 2, there are reasons to believe that we may be born with a rudimentary capacity for mimicking others. Infant mimicry is instinctual but the system is not simply a dumb mechanism that slavishly copies every Tom, Dick or Harry a child encounters. Rather, infants become more discerning of others, assessing whether they are friend or foe. Initially, this distinction is drawn between those that share the same interests and preferences as the baby. In a food-preference study,15 eleven-month-olds were offered the choice of crackers or cereal from two bowls. Having made their choice, they watched as two puppets came along and approached the food. For each bowl, one puppet said, ‘Hmm, yum, I like this’ and the other said, ‘Ewww, yuck, I don’t like that.’ Each puppet expressed the opposite attitude to each food. The infant was then offered the choice to select to play with one of the puppets. Four out of five infants chose the puppet that had the same food preference as him or herself, irrespective of whether it was crackers or cereal. Before they have reached their first birthday, babies are showing clear signs of preference and prejudice. Just as their brains are tuning into the faces and voices that surround them, so too are they learning to identify who is, and who is not, like them.
To make this distinction, one has to have a sense of self-identity – knowing who we are and how we differ from others. This emerges most conspicuously during the second year of life. Famously, humans and other social animals recognize themselves in mirrors.16 Initially young infants treat their reflected image as a playmate, but around eighteen to twenty months they begin to show reliable mirror identification, indicating a new level of self-awareness.17 Somewhere between two and three years of age, children begin to show signs of embarrassment as indicated by blushing. As blood flushes our skin, reddening our face, blushing is an indicator of being uncomfortable in a situation that attracts the undesired attention of others. As Charles Darwin noted,
It is not the simple act of reflecting on our own appearance, but the thinking what others think of us, which excites a blush. In absolute solitude the most sensitive person would be quite indifferent about his appearance.18
Why blushing evolved is a bit of a mystery, but one suggestion is that it could work as a visual apology to others, thereby averting social ostracism.19 The problem with that is that blushing is not obvious in dark-skinned people and we were all dark once. Did it evolve its signalling properties only after the migration out of Africa? Nobody really knows why humans are the only animal that blushes, but the fact that it only occurs in the company of others means it must be related to signalling our sense of shame and guilt – emotions that depend on what we think others are thinking about us.
Self-awareness in children is also signalled by the appearance of the use of personal pronouns that we talked about in the last chapter when it comes to owning stuff. Towards the end of the second year, children are using ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘mine’, but they are also using gender labels such as ‘girl’, ‘boy’, ‘man’ and ‘woman’ – though females are ahead of males simply because they are generally more advanced with language.20 This self-labelling as a boy or girl is one of the first markers of identity. Infants are sensitive to gender much earlier because they all show preferences for the female face at three to four months of age,21 but by the time they are two years old, most have a preference for their own gender.22 In fact, sensitivity to gender predates racial prejudice that appears much later. When asked to select potential friends from photographs, three- and four-year-olds show a reliable preference for their own gender but not their own race.23
Once they know they are a boy or a girl, they become gender detectives, seeking out information about what makes boys different from girls.24 This is when they begin to conform to the cultural stereotypes present in society. Not only are they gender detectives but they also police the differences as enforcers, criticizing those who display attitudes or behaviours associated with the opposite gender. By three to five years of age, children are already saying negative things about other children who they do not identify with. They are making a distinction between in-groups and out-groups. If you are in my gang, then we are both in-group members.
Initially group identity is gender specific but it can be based on something as trivial as dress code, which is why three-year-olds will prefer other children who wear the same-coloured T-shirt as themselves.25 Child psychologist Rebecca Bigler at the University of Texas in Austin, who has spent twenty-five years studying interventions aimed at countering children’s bigotry, has concluded that once the child develops a prejudicial social stereotype, it can be almost impossible to get them to abandon it – ‘In the case of stereotyping and prejudice, it may well be that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.’26
Knowing me, knowing you
When we think about ourselves and others, certain areas are activated in our brains. Harvard neuroscientist Jason Mitchell,27 one of the new vanguard of researchers in the field of social cognitive neuroscience, has pointed out that there is good evidence that there may be four to six regions that form networks that are consistently activated in social situations and not in other types of problem solving. If you are asked to imagine whether or not a historical figure like Christopher Columbus would know what an MP3 player is, this type of question activates these socially sensitive networks. This is because you have to infer the mindset of Columbus and imagine what he would think. However, if you ask whether an MP3 player is smaller than a bread bin, these areas remain silent. This is because the question now becomes a perceptual judgement based on your knowledge about the size relationship between different physical objects.