by Cris Beam
The other part of the Darwin quote, which Ramachandran didn’t remember or didn’t cite, is the opening—before the bit about false views doing little harm. It goes, “False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long.” Darwin didn’t live in the internet era, when views could evolve into facts with a few clicks.
This is at the very heart of the mirror neuron debate: as soon as the cells were discovered and theories posited about their role, those suppositions took on the status of fact, and more theories and experiments were built upon that. But many dissenters argue that the mirror neuron edifice—from which books, programs, and centers have sprung—is built on shaky foundations. “There’s no direct evidence that mirror neurons are the basis for action understanding; there’s no direct evidence for it and lots of evidence against it,” says Dr. Gregory Hickok, a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of The Myth of Mirror Neurons. “Understanding action” is precisely what Rizzolatti and the Parma team posited the neurons were doing—because they were motor cells that corresponded to movements the monkeys saw as well as to movements the monkeys made. Hickok notes that in fact these new cells could be doing any number of things (doing basic sensorimotor action planning, for instance). The discovery wasn’t the problem, but the inference was, and it launched what Hickok calls “the mirror neuron enterprise.”
“In a lot of the psychology papers, the first paragraph assumes mirror neurons are the basis for action understanding. Once you assume that, and if you assume humans have mirror neurons, you can build lots of interesting stories about empathy, language, learning,” Hickok said. “But if that foundational assumption is incorrect then the whole house of cards falls.”
At the beginning, mirror neuron skeptics complained that the cells had never been found in humans: monkey proof didn’t equal human proof. The mirror neurons in macaques are a very specific subset of individual cells discovered only by sticking micro-thin electrodes into many neurons and then picking them out one by one. Scientists couldn’t do this in humans because they couldn’t go around sawing open skulls. Until, in 2009, they could.
NEUROSCIENCE LABORATORIES, despitetheir sexy sci-fi implications, tend to look like any other college department: people sit at desks and work on computers. fMRI scanners, EEG machines—all the tools that actually peer beneath the skull—are locked away in other rooms or other buildings for their short interludes with subjects. Most of the work happens after scans or recordings are gathered. Scientists correct for noise and motion, compare variance, and analyze data points before they come up with anything that looks like the Sno-Cone–colored photographs they publish.
I had been to the UCLA Brain Mapping Center years back, when my first wife, a neurophysicist, was getting her Ph.D. there. That was before it became the site where mirror neurons were first identified in humans. The place was exactly as I remembered it: skylights, polished cement floors, butter-yellow couches, and closed doors, behind which lab directors sat at blonde, wraparound desks with their laptops. I met with Dr. Marco Iacoboni, who directs the lab, and the graduate students who found the human mirror neurons. He sat at one of these desks, spotless save for his computer and a framed photo of Roger Federer he had won at an auction.
Iacoboni speaks quickly and with an accent; he’s from Rome. He was surprised when people demanded evidence of mirror neurons in humans: they don’t require such replication in other animal discoveries. After all, he said, the whole ethical justification for animal research is undermined if you can’t make human inferences. Still, when epilepsy patients at UCLA had single-cell electrodes implanted for pre-surgery recordings, Iacoboni’s graduate student Roy Mukamel went to their beds and had them perform similar tasks to the original macaques in Italy.
They found mirror neurons, but the parallels weren’t perfect. In fact, Mukamel and his team saw mirror neurons also in non-motor regions. “They were in the entorhinal cortex, which is a part of the brain that is important for memory, visual processing,” Iacoboni said, adding that when he first saw the data, he couldn’t believe it. But then he realized mirroring went much further than merely repeating an action. “When I see you grabbing a cup of coffee, I not only activate my motor plans to derive the same motor use to grab a cup of coffee. I also have all these memory neurons in the medial temporal lobe,” he said. “These memory neurons remember the neural trace of myself grabbing a cup of coffee. Which in turn invokes all these memories associated with the smell of the coffee, my dopamine release when I’m anticipating drinking the coffee. All these things are part of a very rich form of empathizing with others, it’s very foundational.”
But what about the idea that Hickok raises? All we can really tell about mirror neurons is that they discharge. How did Iacoboni know their role in the process he described?
“Of course, it’s very difficult to completely prove it; that’s a very high bar to set,” Iacoboni said. He opened and closed his laptop and smiled. He was a believer. He had written Mirroring People: The Science of Empathy and How We Connect with Others a few years back—the first book in English to explain mirror neurons and their potential to a lay audience. Iacoboni said that the basic reason that he, Rizzolatti, and now many others believed that mirror neurons formed the basis for action understanding was that that is simply how it felt, inside, experientially. “We think that’s what they’re doing because of a phenomenological experience.”
In other words, all this science is based on a hunch—the intuitive sense that when “I” watch “you,” I don’t cognitively, logically, think through your actions. Rather, I restage my own memory of this action (and experience its attendant emotional associations) in an internal neural map of myself. Iacoboni nodded: yes, this depiction of mirror neuron function was intuitive. But it was only a start.
“Our analogy is that you have a house. The house is empathy. Mirroring is not the whole house, but it’s the foundation,” he said. “On top of the house, you can build other things, much more complex things.”
The mirroring process, he thinks, is very simple: babies do it right out of the womb when they copy tongue movements and other facial expressions. More complex imitation is built on this mirroring, and learning can be built on that. Iacoboni says humans imitate one another unconsciously, automatically, though some do it more than others. There are now studies that show the more often a person imitates, the more empathic she’ll be in social situations. This, he suggests, could indicate mirror neurons are a starting line. “It tells us that in fact the way we get into the minds of others is by simulating or imitating or reenacting what they do.”
THE DAY I WENT to visit Ramachandran in San Diego, his office looked like that of an eccentric Victorian scientist. There were jars of brains scattered about and a plaster cast of a saber-toothed tiger skeleton perched atop his desk. Like his surroundings, Rama was more colorful than Dr. Iacoboni in his response to the mirror neuron debate: “All the objections they’ve raised are nonsense: they’re confounding mechanism, which is what we’re trying to understand with mirror neurons, with description, which is the theory of other minds. It’s like saying if you know about the feces that come out from the food you’re eating you don’t need to know about the liver, the pancreas. It’s a straw man.”
But the straw man’s gaining weight and heft. The people looking to disprove mirror neurons are, still, studying mirror neurons. And the believers, like Iacoboni, are exploring what they call “mirror systems”—psychological experiments on empathy replete with whole-brain scans that, as of now, can’t isolate images of single neurons, mirror or otherwise. Ramachandran and his lab have taken scanning and the brain out of the equation entirely; they’re just looking at empathic exchanges.
“The discovery of the mirror neurons led us to ask this question in the first place,” Ramachandran said, explaining a current experiment wherein subjects with obsessive-compulsive traits are asked to witness an experimenter touch
disgusting (and unbeknownst to them, false) things like feces and vomit. The OCD subjects then instruct the experimenter to wash his hands in a specific way or perform a ritual—and the subjects reportedly feel relief. This, Ramachandran suggests, could have treatment implications: OCD patients, rather than performing their own elaborate rituals in their own lives, could perhaps watch shorter and shorter videos of ritual performances until the need disappears.
And maybe that’s the point of all this: mirror neuron science may be misguided, but it’s given us a new place to look. Iacoboni is excited about the cross-pollination that empathy research has yielded—between neuroscience and psychology, neuroscience and philosophy. He’s been talking with anthropologists and authors to understand the ways they think about empathy and then talking with engineers about designing brain implants to scan interactions in real time.
“Right now we study brains in isolation. Ideally, you want to study brains that are interacting,” Iacoboni said. This means developing a now-distant technology, as well as transforming the way scientists, and a lot of us, think. He looked around his corner office: it has frosted windows, so he couldn’t look out, and no one could look in. “Academics seem to spend a lot of time in their offices, thinking and writing in isolation, so that’s the dominant model in academia. In fact, our brain is shaped by our social interactions. If I strip all my social relationships out of myself, nothing is left.”
And if I break down all the articles and books and news reports and look at the programs and departments and experts they’ve spawned, this is the essential message of the mirror neurons: we are social creatures. It’s not that this idea is new or revolutionary; it’s that it bucks up against the Darwinian-individualist ethos that’s dominated for generations. Mirror neurons invited an about-face. They invited us to think not about how we get ahead but how we get along.
While I welcome this shift, this newfound recognition that we human beings are destined for relation rather than almighty independence, something sticks in my throat when I hear about new empathy studies. Something closes in. Sometimes it’s the marketing, or the commodification of kindness, the empathy-with-a-goal that bothers me. But it’s also something fundamental in the language and approach, something that, despite the squabbling over empathy semantics and definitions in academia, hasn’t been defined or theorized enough in society at large. Empathy hasn’t grown up. Mirrors, after all, are the root metaphor here, and mirrors don’t let us see other people. They only bounce us right back to ourselves.
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About the Author
CRIS BEAM is the author of Transparent: Love, Family, and Living the T with Transgender Teenagers, which won a Lambda Literary Award, and I Am J, a novel for young adults. She teaches creative writing at Columbia University, New York University, and Bayview Correctional Facility. She lives in New York City.