The Self Illusion

by Bruce Hood

  Monkey See – Monkey Do

  Have you ever wondered why you wince when you see someone else being punched? After all, it’s not you who is taking a beating, but you copy their reaction. Neuroscientists have been studying the neural basis of this social copying phenomenon following the discovery of brain cells, aptly named ‘mirror neurons’, that appear to fire in sympathy when watching other people’s actions. Mirror neurons can be found in the cortical regions of the brain towards the front and top of the head known as the supplementary motor area that is active during the planning and execution of movements.

  The mirror neuron system was originally discovered by accident in the laboratories of the Italian neurophysiologist, Giacomo Rizzolatti, in the 1990s.72 I remember attending an early lecture given by Rizzolatti in which he explained how he and fellow researchers had implanted an electrode into the brain region of a monkey that controls movements to study the firing of neurons while the monkey reached to pick up a peanut. As predicted the neuron fired when the animal reached out to pick up the reward. But what they didn’t expect was that the same neuron also fired when the animal watched the human experimenter pick up the peanut. How could that be? This was a cell in the motor area of the monkey’s brain, not in the human’s brain. It was as if the cell was mirroring the behaviour of someone else. The monkey mirror neurons did not fire to just any movement of the human, but only to the actions that led to retrieving the peanut. The neuron seemed to know the experimenter’s goal. Whether mirror neurons are a distinct class of specialized neurons is still hotly debated,73 but they do appear to resonate with other people’s actions and therefore could reveal what is on other people’s minds.

  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 oth
ers. 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.

  It might make for compulsive viewing but all hell would break loose as social conventions collapsed, which is why we need to control ourselves in public. This control is achieved by mechanisms in the front part of the brain that regulate and coordinate behaviours by inhibition. These frontal regions are some of the last to reach maturity in the developing brain, which is one of the reasons why young children can be so impulsive. They have not yet learned how to control their urges.

  For the Tourette’s sufferer, somewhere along their developmental path, something has gone wrong with aspects of their impulse control. Their tic symptoms are like spasms that seem to be automatically triggered. Some tics are just simple twitches but others are more complex and disruptive, such as coprolalia – the urge to shout obscenities. Many of us have felt like swearing out loud on a number of occasions, but some Touretters are unable to stop themselves from doing so. Drugs that influence the activity of inhibitory neurotransmitters can alleviate many of the tics but, so far, there is no cure for Tourette’s syndrome. Touretters have to fight a constant battle to control their tics and these battles are worst when there are other people around. As the pressure to behave normally in a social situation increases, the urge to tic can be like an itch you can never scratch – and the more you try to stop the tic, the more the urge builds up, just like a sneeze. Not surprisingly, social encounters can be extremely stressful, making the condition worse as Touretters try to control themselves in the crowd. I expect that many of us have these impulses in social situations, but why?

  I think the answer is related to the problem faced by those with Tourette’s Syndrome. The presence of others triggers anxiety as we become self-conscious in public. We feel that we are being monitored and evaluated, which makes the need to appear normal more critical. This fear in turn increases levels of anxiety. As our anxiety increases, we lose control over impulses and urges.

  Where does that self-consciousness come from if not from others? Babies are not initially self-conscious. After all, who can be if they have little control over bowel movements? Somewhere along the path of childhood we start to develop a sense of self-identity and pride. As we discover who we are, we come to value our self, based on what others think. Earning respect and social acceptance from others is probably one of the major preoccupations that we can have. But, you might argue, who is in control of these anti-social thoughts and actions if not the self? The answer is that others both trigger those reactions as well as suppress the need to express them. On our own, there is no need to conform, but we did not evolve to live on our own.

  Early social development begins by copying others and we continue to do so throughout our lives. The self illusion ensures that we are either oblivious of the extent to which we mimic others or think that we deliberately copy others. When we act socially we think that we are calling the shots and pulling the strings but this belief in autonomy is part of the illusion. We are much more dependent on others than we appreciate. We want to be part of the group but that, in turn, means we have to control our behaviours. We cannot just do whatever we want and be accepted. We want to be valued by others but before we can fulfill that obsession with self-esteem, we have to be able to gauge what others think of us. That requires developing an awareness and appreciation of what others think – something that takes a bit of experience and know-how.

  3

  The Looking Glass Self

  After his career has faltered, über-male model Derek Zoolander, protagonist of the 2001 film Zoolander, looks at his reflection in the muddy puddle next to the sidewalk and asks himself, ‘Who am I?’ To answer this, he decides that he must embark on a journey home. It’s a familiar story of self-discovery – where we seek to find the answer to who we are by following the trail of evidence right back to our childhood. Most of us, including superstar male models, have this sense of origins. We think of our self as travelling a path in time from childhood to adulthood, punctuated by life events and the people along the way who have influenced us and shaped who we are.

  Our self exists in the reflection that the world holds up to us. In 1902, American sociologist Charles Horton Cooley coined the term, ‘the looking glass self’ to express the way that the self is shaped by the reflected opinions of others around us.1 People shape themselves to fit other people’s perceptions, and these vary from one person and context to the next. Spouse, family, boss, colleagues, lover, adoring fans and beggar in the street each hold a looking glass up to us every time we interact and we present a different self. Each person or group may think they know us but they cannot because they are not privy to the all the different contexts in which we exist. This is the familiar lament of celebrities who complain that the persona they present to the general public is not the true personality they hold privately. More than that, Cooley argued that there is no real identity that exists separately to the one created by others. We are a product of those around us or least what we believe they expect from us. He summed up this notion of the self illusion in this tongue-twister of logic, ‘I am not what I think I am and I am not what you think I am; I am what I think that you think I am.’

  Consider the different questions and implications raised by Cooley’s looking glass self. How do we develop a sense of self in the first place? How do children develop an understanding of what others think and, more importantly, what they think about them? This must be especially important during that most difficult time of adolescence when children try to find their true self. How is our identity shaped by the characteristics that are imposed on us by biology and cultural stereotypes? All of these questions reflect upon the sense that the self is defined by those around us.

  Man in the Mirror

  When Derek Zoolander looked in the puddle and saw an incredibly good-looking face, he immediately knew who it was staring back at him in the reflection. However, this seemingly trivial ability to recognize one’s self is not something that everyone can do. As we age, brain death can progressively destroy everyday functions that we take for granted – including those that generate our sense of identity. Take TH, a seventy-seven-year-old Australian man who would look in the mirror and describe the gentleman staring back at him as a ‘dead ringer’ for himself, but it was definitely someone else.2 TH had normal intelligence and was not crazy, but he could not appreciate that the reflection in the mirror was his o
wn. When asked where this man in the mirror had come from, TH replied that he must be a neighbour in an adjoining apartment. He confabulated a bizarre story to fit with his experience of the stranger in the mirror, but the truth is TH has a rare neurological condition called ‘mirror misidentification’ in which patients think their own reflection does not belong to them. They appreciate the likeness, but there is no self-recognition. Something in the face-processing circuitry of their brain has failed to register their own outward identity. There is no flicker of familiarity.

  Mirror misidentification is one of the dissociation disorders where individuals do not feel connected to reality. Their sense of self and identity within the world is distorted. Sometimes people even believe that they are dead and that the world around them and all their experience are an illusion. This death delusion, known as Cotard’s syndrome,3 is rare but I got an insight into the condition from a colleague whose own father had Cotard’s syndrome and described it as like living in an artificial world where nothing was real. Experiencing the here and now as real is part of being consciously aware of your present surroundings, but disconnection disorders such as Cotard’s remind us that we need a healthy brain to keep us in touch with reality. Sometimes we can all experience a disconnection or depersonalization in which we feel a sense of unreality and detachment from our self. Symptoms include dreamlike states, loss of empathy and a sense of disconnection with our bodies.4 It can seem like we are actors in a play or that we are watching the world from behind glass. It is surprisingly common. Estimates vary but up to three out of four of us have felt like this at some time in our lives, especially after a stressful life event. Over half the combat troops returning from tours of duty are thought to experience depersonalization. Clearly, if brain disorders and stressful life events can distort the personal experience of self such that an individual does not feel that they are really themselves anymore, then these episodes reveal the fragility of the self in the first place.