The discovery of mirror neurons spread through the academic community like wildfire. Some likened their discovery as having the same impact in neuroscience as unravelling the structure of DNA had in biology.74 This was because mirror neurons seemed to provide a way of knowing other people’s goals and intentions. Mirror neurons operate like a direct link between minds in the same way that computers can be networked so that when I type a sentence on my laptop, it will appear on your screen. This possibility was a big leap forward for neuro-scientists working on how we establish that others have minds similar to our own.
If my mirror neurons fire when watching someone else’s actions, then because my actions are already linked to my own mind, I simply have to know what is on my mind to know what you are thinking. As we noted earlier, if you smile and I automatically smile back at you, this triggers happy thoughts in me as well as a good feeling. By mirroring your behaviour I can directly experience the emotional state that you are experiencing. When we mimic someone else’s expression with our own muscles, we can readily access the same emotion that is usually responsible for generating that expression. This may be why people who have their own facial muscles temporarily paralysed following a Botox injection to remove wrinkles are not as good at reading other people’s emotional expressions because they are unable to copy them.75
Mirror neurons are part of the reason we enjoy watching movies and plays. When we watch others we can experience their emotions directly. When we empathize with the emotions of others, we feel their pain and joy. In a condition known as mirror-touch synaesthesia, individuals literally feel the pain of others. For example, they could not watch Raging Bull or other movies involving boxing. Brain imaging reveals that when these individuals watch other people, they have over-activation of the mirror system associated with touch.76 Another region lights up known as the anterior insula, which is active when we are making self versus other discriminations, so these individuals find it difficult to distinguish between what is happening to them compared to what is happening to someone else.
According to synaesthesia expert, Jamie Ward, just over one in a hundred have mirror-touch synaesthesia but many more of us have a milder experience when we wince watching someone being hurt.77 Other people’s emotional displays similarly trigger the same emotional circuits that are active during our own traumatic experiences. That’s why tearjerkers work. They plug straight into the same brain regions that are active in our heads when we feel sad. TV producers have known this for decades by using canned laughter to prompt the same response in viewers because laughter is emotionally contagious. We cannot help but smile when others do so. This effect is enhanced if the laughter is interspersed with the occasional shot of a studio audience member cracking up in hysterics.
Mirror neurons can also explain other aspects of social behaviour, including our tendency towards mimicry – that involuntary human behaviour in which we unconsciously duplicate another’s movements and actions. When people queue up, they space themselves out equally from each other and often adopt the same postures. People in rocking chairs unintentionally end up rocking in synchrony when they watch each other.78 During conversations, people will cross and uncross their limbs, nod their heads and mimic all manner of movements in synchronization with the other person, though it is worth noting that this depends on whether they like or agree with each other in the first place. This issue is discussed in more depth in Chapter 6 because it turns out that mimicry has important consequences on how we respond to others we consider to be like us or different.
What about yawning? Have you ever had that involuntary urge to yawn after watching someone else stretch open their mouth and bellow out that wail to slumber. Around half of us will yawn if we watch someone else yawning. No one is quite sure why we do this as a species. One theory is that it is a behaviour that helps to synchronize our biological clocks. However, a more intriguing possibility is that yawning is a form of emotional contagion – like a rapidly spreading disease, we catch the urge to copy others as a way of visibly bonding together. This may explain why contagious yawning is not present in young babies but develops somewhere between three and four years of age when children sharpen their awareness of others having thoughts.79
And what about vomiting? Just the sight of someone else being sick can induce an involuntary gag in those around them – in the movie Stand By Me, there is some truth in Gordie’s campfire story about the ‘barf’o’rama’ where the protagonist, Lardass, induces mass vomiting in a crowd attending the village pie-eating competition. It is not just sights. In one survey to find which sound that people found the most horrible, the noise of someone vomiting was considered the most disgusting.80 Such emotional contagion would be a very useful way of learning important information from others about what’s safe to eat. After all, what we find disgusting can be shaped by what others around us think. It’s as if all of our systems, designed to pay attention to others, appear to be set up to resonate with what others are experiencing.
If we smile, cry, yawn, wince, wretch, rock, nod, synchronize and basically mimic others all the time, to what extent are these the actions of an autonomous self, independent of others? Of course, as soon as our attention is drawn to these mirroring behaviours we can resist the urge to produce them but that is not the point. Normally, it is in our nature to resonate with others, which is why these examples reveal our inherent dependence on others, and this is part of the self illusion. These findings reveal a whole host of external, extrinsic factors vying for control of us. If we resist, then we do so by exerting effort or alternative actions. Some would regard that as a self being in control – an internal agent that does not want to do what others in the group want. I would contend that we are often capable of vetoing the influence of others but that is not our natural disposition. Second, most of us can redeploy actions to achieve different outcomes but that is simply a readjustment of internal states and drives. We can do this often, but not always.
Mimicry binds us in an intimate relationship with others, but imagine what would happen if you mimicked every person you encountered. Imagine if you could not redeploy your actions and stop your self from copying others. With so many people doing different things, it would soon overwhelm you. You would lose your self because you had been replaced by the identity of others. Oliver Sacks, the neurologist, described how he once encountered a woman on the streets of New York who was compelled to copy everyone she passed in the crowd. The woman, in her sixties, was mimicking the movements and expressions of every passerby in a quick-fire succession lasting no more than a second or two. As each passerby responded to her overt display with irritation, this in turn was mimicked back to them thereby increasing the ludicrous display. Sacks followed the woman as she turned down an alleyway:
And there with the appearance of a woman violently sick, she expelled, tremendously accelerated and abbreviated, all the gestures, the postures, the expressions, the demeanours, the entire behavioural repertoires of the past forty or fifty people she had passed. She delivered one vast, pantomimic regurgitation, in which the engorged identities of the last fifty people who had possessed her were spewed out.81
The unfortunate woman had an extreme form of the condition known as Tourette’s syndrome that is characterized by involuntary movements, thoughts and behaviours. Whereas we can voluntarily copy others even though we are often unaware of what we are doing, for her, mimicking others had become a compulsion. Luckily, Tourette’s is a rare condition but it reveals how each of us has to regulate our behaviours to be socially acceptable. Normally, when we have an urge, we can voluntarily control it. We may not be aware of it but we are constantly fighting a battle with our impulses and urges that, left unchecked, could make us socially unacceptable. Most of us have had socially unacceptable thoughts about others but we can usually keep these to our selves. Imagine how difficult life would be if you acted out every thought or told everyone exactly what you were thinking.