by Paul Singh
These brain areas acting in concert are directly and indirectly connected to higher cognitive areas of the human brain. Although perception and action have their overlaps, intellectual cognition is never entirely left out. The cognitive capacities of a monkey or human brain still place serious limitations on how much imitation can be quickly acquired. A monkey can intuitively see what it is like to grasp a banana, but there is little reaction from watching a human use a screwdriver or a calculator. A monkey’s mirror neurons won’t activate unless an observed action is perceived as something approximating to an action the monkey can already perform. Similarly, a small child will be able to speedily imitate the hand-twisting motion for using a screwdriver, since a wide range of motion comes with having a human hand, but that child won’t imitate an adult changing a tire on a car. Children’s brains have so much cognitive complexity that simple crude imitation accumulates with practice into a fair level of skill at ordinary tasks, such a tying the laces of a shoe.
Researchers have suggested that advanced mirror neurons may be involved with helping human children to quickly grasp the intended purpose behind the actions of others, and to imitate those actions for themselves. Small children are eager and enthusiastic imitators of almost everything they see others doing. This is especially true if children are directly engaged in joint tasks going on that involve them too. Participating in group activities can occupy a small child’s rapt attention like little else. The developmental psychology of children can track the growth of social cognition, as more and more cognitive effort is devoted to figuring out what other people want to do, how they are doing things, and what needs to be done to join in group activities.
Cooperative activities develop the emotional part of the child’s life, because the child is sensing and feeling what others are feeling as activities proceed. Positive and negative feedback at that emotional level is the most immediate sign of successful participation, so a child appears to be completely absorbed in the emotional flow of social interactions. Perhaps some mirror neurons are involved in the brain processes mediating social and emotional cognition during group activities. At least this is what two leading neuroscientists on mirror neurons, Giacomo Rizzolatti and Corrado Sinigaglia, believe:
The brain’s capacity to echo the perception of the faces and gestures of others and code them immediately in visceromotor terms, supplies the neural substrate for an empathetic sharing that, albeit in different ways and at diverse levels, substantiates and directs our conduct and our interindividual relationships.3
A richly emotional and empathetic life must be acquired among others already displaying emotional behaviors. Small children experience emotions, aroused haphazardly by events happening around them, but it would be impossible to learn what those passing feelings really mean without understanding how other people have them too. Emotions are counted among the most personal matters about ourselves. Yet their entire significance and value for life depends on how we communicate and share in emotions together in social relationships. Mirror neurons in the human brain may play a role in jump-starting this sympathetic response to what other people are doing and hence help the developing brain to connect one’s own responses to others’ behaviors.
Beyond these developmental stages of infant and childhood learning, might mirror neurons be playing roles for more complex social relationships? Cognitive scientist Gregory Hickok observes that the theory of mirror neurons has been connected to all sorts of psychological and sociological phenomena. In his book The Myth of Mirror Neurons,4 Hickok assembles a long list of scientific publications in recent years which appeal to mirror neurons to help explain such things as: lip reading, stuttering, schizophrenia, comprehension of action words, imitation, phantom limbs, neuro-rehabilitation, hypnosis, misattribution of anger, sexual orientation, cigarette smoking, music appreciation, political attitudes, felt presence, facial emotional recognition, obesity, the degree of male erection, psychopathic personality disorder, love, contagious yawning, and even business leadership.
Hickok casts doubt on whether the amount of proven evidence for mirror neurons in humans could really support so many different matters. He shares his suspicion that this list demonstrates a band-wagon effect among researchers, who have become over-eager to connect their studies with a popular theory.
In order to credit mirror neurons with such broad influence over so many sophisticated human behaviors, it would be necessary to confirm the presence of a few motor areas in the brain which simultaneously have responsibilities for comprehending the behaviors of others around us. As Hickok explains in his book, those needed scientific confirmations simply aren’t established yet. Too many areas of the brain besides specific motor regions can be shown to be necessary for understanding and imitating the complex actions of other people. Everyone agrees that specialized motor neurons are deeply connected to those other cognitive areas so that they work together. The mirror neuron theory has specifically claimed that special mirror neurons in motor areas are carrying the heaviest burden when an imitation behavior is being done. Hickok says there is no evidence in the research that motor neurons are responsible for these complex activities:
The weight of the evidence points to a model of action understanding in which the posterior temporal lobe, rather than the motor system, plays a central role. I don’t mean to imply that this region is a phrenological island for the storage of action knowledge. It is more likely a kind of hub, a convergence zone, to use the terminology of Antonio Damasio, that binds together a broader network that represents and processes information related to actions.5
Hickok goes on to indicate how the limited evidence for a very modest sort of mirroring neural process could be incorporated into a better model:
The motor part, while associated with action for sure, is such a minute part of the bigger picture as to be virtually useless on its own. At the very most, one could possibly argue that accessing a motor copy of the perceived action could help facilitate or speed access to the broader, nonmotor network that enables understanding. But this is far from the claimed “basis of action understanding” that generated the excitement about mirror neurons in the first place.6
It is undoubtedly true that infants and children, and to a certain extent adults as well, utilize networks of cognitive areas across many brain regions to imitate and comprehend what others are doing. But this psychological approach to social cognition is hardly new, as Hickok recounts in his book.
The originality of this general theory of imitative behavior is at least revolutionary in this sense: we do not first try to comprehend, and then try to imitate, what others are observed to be doing. The reverse is actually the case. As our brains develop and learn, we first figure out how to imitate the actions of others, and only then do we accurately comprehend what those people are doing. Put another way, comprehension isn’t a separate matter distinct from imitation. Successful imitation is our basic mode of social comprehension, and more sophisticated kinds of cooperative behaviors build upon this cognitive foundation.
Discovering Our Selves
Human children quickly surpass the self-identity capacities of all other animals. Infants are very attentive to human faces and their expressions, especially when directed towards them. Direct personal engagement soon develops into a reciprocal exchange of gestures, and the gestures which happen to be most effective at sustaining the other’s interest tend to be retained by the infant:
Mutual engagement occurs in the first two months in the form of a dynamic matching and exchange of facial and bodily expressions of positive emotion. This engagement develops into proto-conversation that involves turn-taking, usually defined as the reciprocal coordination and sequencing of behavior in time. Proto-conversations are regulated by vocalization, visual attention, emotion expression, bodily action, and verbal communication. Infants take turns and can produce differentiated responses to adults’ attention by two months. The sharing of experiences requires the complementary abilities o
f recognizing the experiences of another individual (a second person) and making available one’s own (first person) experiences to someone else. . . . [T]he infant can directly experience the bi-directional relation between self and other in mutual engagement, and eventually develops an intuitive understanding of intersubjectivity and a sense of self.7
Only by being repeatedly treated as a subject—as an individual with significant actions and experience — will an infant develop genuine subjectivity. The inter-subjectivity of which psychologists speak isn’t the classical model. It is born more of Cartesian philosophy than science in that it assumes that subjectivity is already fully present and awaiting contact and communication with another pre-existing subject. Rather, inter-subjectivity as an engaging whole, completely absorbs the infant’s attention, and only later does an older infant begin to have its own subjectivity for itself when no one is engaged with it.
Because the ability of a child to pass the mirror test closely correlates with what developmental psychologists call “executive control,” developmental psychologists attempt to analyze executive control into simpler cognitive functions and to discover which functions are acquired in succession prior to age four. Executive control includes the ability of a child to avoid a habitual behavior in a situation and instead to adapt or switch to a different behavior, the capacity to plan purposeful responses in order to achieve goals, and the exercise of self-control to be thoughtful and patient in an unfamiliar situation. The required components of executive control are the simpler abilities that, when merged together, can permit the emergence of executive control. These components are known as executive functions. Primary executive functions, which develop over the first three years, include an expanding working memory, greater inhibitory control, and increasing mental flexibility. Small children cannot keep in mind what is going on for very long, and without a larger recall memory, they easily revert quickly back to whatever they like doing. Small children also exhibit mostly uninhibited and impulsive actions that can’t have a long-term purpose. Their limited repertoire of habits, the lack of reflection on their habits, and the way that they are easily distracted, similarly limit the behavior of small children to impulsive and inattentive acts.
During the ages of two and three, small children are learning how other people see the world a little differently than themselves, how others have their own emotions, and have their own intended purposes behind their actions. A small child becomes quite proficient at noticing the difference between what a parent wants to be done and what the child wants to do instead. Three-year-olds, like adult chimpanzees who display this high level of inter-personal understanding as well, are the most intellectually advanced at distinguishing what they are minding from what others are minding. The beginnings of the personal mind are established with these advances.
However, human children advance farther than chimpanzees, acquiring complex ideas about what other people think. The crucial years of development are the second and third years. By the age of four, a child can talk about what other people are doing, what they intend to do, and what they believe about the world.
The strengthening and interlinking of executive functions permit four-year-olds to sustain attention to a desired task, remember a planned task long enough to complete it, avoid appealing distractions, obey some rules, perform subtasks in the right order, and figure out different ways to achieve the task to overcome problems. These capacities involve a higher level of emotional control and, along with impulse control, they indicate how long-term memory has been awakened, and they permit the child to appreciate the rewards of completing tasks. Full executive control sufficient for successful task performance, along with some emotional control and social skills, is normally reached around age six. Many cultures use that age, give or take a year, to bring a child into organized inter-family or institutional schooling. Studies of brain functioning around that age also show how the regions associated with social cognition, such as the temporo-parietal junctions and the medial prefrontal cortex, are quite active and apparently working in concert.8
Several areas of the prefrontal cortex are recruited for determining how to respond to the immense amount of communication enveloping a child. The role of language in cognitive development is one of the most intensely studied fields in psychology and neuroscience. The use of spoken language is not essential for basic human psychological development. Homo sapiens emerged around 200,000 years ago and existed for around 150,000 years before anyone was speaking in sentences. Simpler linguistic ways to communicate, such as mimetic gesturing and a limited range of guttural sounds, would have sufficed.9 We do, however, regard spoken language as essential for proper development, now. Our sophisticated cultural life and our individual capacities for managing such complex social lives require full grammatical language. Our cultures presently require advanced language. The deeper question, however, has long been debated. Did humans invent language in order to talk about what they knew was already in their minds, or did the invention of language allow humans to begin to think about what they think, so that language brought individual minds into existence?
If pre-linguistic humans long ago, like infants today, could already think about their own ideas and the ideas of other people, just as easily as they thought about ordinary objects around them like bowls and spoons, then it should be as easy to learn to talk about ideas and beliefs as it is to learn to talk about bowls and spoons. Yet this is obviously not the case with the development of language in small children. Children always learn how to talk about the useful objects around them long before they ever start to refer to their ideas and beliefs. And this long delay certainly isn’t the fault of parents. Parents profusely talk about thoughts and beliefs with their small children. They speak to their children, practically from birth, about feelings, wants, needs, goals, intentions, beliefs, and so on.
We use mentalistic language with infants and children for years before they show much sign that they understand what is being talked about. Several years are required before children can use that kind of language to describe what is going on in their own thoughts. Small children surely have their own ideas and intentions, without question. But we are talking about having individual minds, which requires the additional ability to notice one’s own ideas and intentions as one’s own, and to think about them for their own sake. That requires, at minimum, the ability to notice and pay attention to the difference between beliefs of other people and one’s own beliefs.
What would it be like to be someone who couldn’t tell any difference between beliefs that one has and beliefs that other people have? Well, it would be like being three years old. Three-year-old children evidently can understand that other people have beliefs. If a three-year-old sees his mother putting her shoes inside a closet, the child will expect his mother to retrieve those shoes from that closet. The child believes that the shoes are in the closet, and the child expects his mother to believe that the shoes are in the closet. The belief “the shoes are in the closet” is the same for everyone involved. And that is all a three-year-old child will comprehend.
Developmental psychologists designed a “false belief test” to figure out when a child can begin to understand the difference between the beliefs held by the child and the beliefs held by another person.10 In a false belief test, the child is shown where an item (such as a shoe) is placed by his mother. The child understands where the shoe is and also sees how the mother also understands where the shoe is. Next, the mother leaves the room for a minute. While the mother is absent, the child watches a psychologist remove the shoe from the closet and place it in a nearby drawer. When the mother re-enters the room and wants the shoe, the child is asked where his mother will look for the shoe. A three-year-old always says that mother will look in the drawer. By contrast, a typical four-year-old will consistently say that the mother will look in the closet.
The reason why a three-year-old says that the mother will look for the shoe in the new location lies in
the fact that a three-year-old only keeps track of correct beliefs and assumes that everyone has all the correct beliefs. A four-year-old, by contrast, has begun to distinguish beliefs of other people from the beliefs believed to be accurate. Despite the design of a version that doesn’t require any language ability, no chimpanzee has passed the false belief test, although chimpanzees can appreciate how others have feelings, intentions, perspectives, and attitudes. Chimpanzees are members of a species that has never had to take seriously the individual beliefs of particular chimpanzees.
Four-year-old children appreciate how other people can have false beliefs, and after some further cognitive development, older children will come to realize that they themselves can have false beliefs too. Being able to distinguish between what one thinks is true apart from what others think, and apart from what may actually be true are advanced capacities expected of six-year-old children. The developmental pace displayed by children towards the growth of their own individual minds depends to a large degree on the socialization that a child receives. Children must be properly socialized in families that use language to talk about mental matters, such as the child’s own feelings and desires. The number of people is relevant: children with more siblings acquire these capacities earlier than those who do not have siblings. By contrast, children raised in institutionalized settings with poor socialization and deaf children whose parents cannot use sign language display slower development towards individualized minds.
The Story of Our Lives
Our language abilities allow us to describe and explain what it is like to be us. We love to talk about other people, but we notoriously enjoy talking about ourselves, too.11 Psychologically, this is quite healthy, generally speaking. We have to be able to account for our behavior to others. People can often tell what we are doing at any moment just by careful observation, but the full meaning and long-term consequences of our actions won’t be apparent. Small tasks can have a huge significance. Yes, it is easy for you to see that I am typing a message to someone, but what is the point of that message and why am I sending it to that person? To answer your questions, I have to be prepared to tell a small story, going into the past to relate ongoing matters that need attention now, and going a little into the future to show what I expect to happen next. An explanation that connects the past, present, and future in terms of what is being done to achieve some purpose is the kind of explanation that can be called a “narrative.” A narrative can be a satisfactory explanation for the complex tasks and practices people have to undertake over long stretches of time. Why does grandfather own a house in Dallas? Where did sister learn to be a pharmacist? How will I decide which kind of car to purchase? These questions call for an explanation—a narrative.