The Social Animal

by David Brooks

  Back in the 1930s, H. M. Skeels studied mentally disabled orphans who were living in an institution but were subsequently adopted. After four years, their IQs diverged an amazing fifty points from those of the orphans who were not adopted. And the remarkable thing is that the kids who were adopted were not improved by tutoring and lecturing. The mothers who adopted them were also mentally disabled and living in a different institution. It was the mother’s love and attention that produced the IQ spike.

  By now, Harold’s face lit up when Julia entered the room. This was good because Julia was coming apart at the seams. She hadn’t slept well in months. She once considered herself relatively tidy, but now her house looked like a corner of Rome after a visit from the barbarian hordes. Franklin Roosevelt was able to launch the New Deal in the amount of time that had passed since her last witty observation. But in the mornings Harold let out a big smile and he got to live another day.

  One morning, it dawned on Julia that she knew Harold better than any other person on earth. She knew the ways in which he needed her. She knew his difficulty in making transitions from one setting to another. She sensed, sadly, that he seemed to long for some sort of connection from her that she would never be able to offer.

  Yet they had never actually exchanged a word of conversation. Harold didn’t talk. They got to know each other largely through touch, tears, looks, smell, and laughter. Julia had always assumed that meanings and concepts came through language, but now she realized that it was possible to have a complex human relationship without words.

  Mirror Neurons

  Philosophers have long argued about the process people use to understand one another. Some believe that we are careful theorizers. We come up with hypotheses about how other people will behave, and then test those hypotheses against the evidence we observe minute by minute. In this theory, people come across as rational scientists, constantly weighing evidence and testing explanations. And there’s clear evidence that this sort of hypothesis testing is part of how we understand one another. But these days most of the research points to the primacy of a rival hypothesis: that we automatically simulate others, and understand what others feel by feeling a version of what they are experiencing, in ourselves. In this view, people aren’t cold theorizers who are making judgments about other creatures. They are unconscious Method actors who understand by sharing or at least simulating the responses they see in the people around them. We’re able to function in a social world because we partially permeate each other’s minds and understand—some people more, some people less. Human beings understand others in themselves, and they form themselves by reenacting the internal processes they pick up from others.

  In 1992 researchers at the University of Parma in Italy were studying the brains of macaque monkeys, when they noticed a strange phenomenon. When a monkey saw a human researcher grab a peanut and bring it to his mouth, the monkey’s brain would fire just as if the monkey were itself grabbing a peanut and bringing it to its own mouth, even though the monkey wasn’t actually moving at all. The monkey was automatically simulating the mental processes it observed in another.

  So was born the theory of mirror neurons, the idea that we have in our heads neurons that automatically re-create the mental patterns of those around us. Mirror neurons are not physically different from any other sort of neuron; it’s the way the former are connected that seems to enable them to perform this remarkable task of deep imitation.

  Over the last few years mirror neurons have become one of the most hyped and debated issues in all of neuroscience. Some scientists believe mirror neurons are akin to DNA, and will revolutionize our understanding of how people internally process outer experiences, how we learn from and communicate with others. Others think the whole idea is vastly overblown. They are quick to point out that the phrase “mirror neurons” is patently misleading because it suggests the mimicking skill is contained in the neurons, not in the networks in the brain. But there does seem to be a widely held view that monkey and human brains have an automatic ability to perform deep imitation, and in this way share mental processes across the invisible space between them. As Marco Iacoboni has observed, people are able to feel what others experience as if it were happening to them.

  The monkeys in Parma not only mimicked the actions they observed, they seemed to unconsciously evaluate the intentions behind them. Their neurons fired intensely when a glass was picked up in a context that suggested drinking, but they did not fire the same way when an empty glass was picked up in a context that suggested cleaning up. The monkey’s brains would not fire when scientists merely pantomimed picking up a raisin, but they did fire when the scientists picked up a real raisin. Their neurons fired in a certain characteristic pattern when they saw a scientist tearing a piece of paper, but they also fired in that same pattern when they merely heard a scientist tearing paper. In other words these weren’t mere “monkey see, monkey do” imitations of physical actions. The way the brains reacted to an action was inextricably linked to the goal implied by the action. We sometimes assume that the mental process of perceiving an action is distinct from the mental process of evaluating an action. But in these examples, the processes of perception and evaluation are all intermingled. They share the same representational systems, the same network patterns in the brain.

  Since those original experiments in Italy, many scientists, including Iacoboni, believe they have found mirror neurons in humans. Human mirror neurons help people interpret the intention of an action, although unlike monkey mirror neurons, they seem to be able to imitate an action even when no goal is detected. A woman’s brain will respond with a certain pattern as she watches a person use two fingers to pick up a wineglass, but her brain will respond in a different way as she watches a person use two fingers and the same action to pick up a toothbrush. Her brain will respond one way when it watches another human in the act of speaking, but a different way when it watches a monkey in the act of chattering.

  When people watch a chase scene in a movie, they respond as if they were actually being chased, except at lower intensity. When they look at pornography, their brains respond as if they were actually having sex, except at lower intensity. When Harold watched Julia look down lovingly at him, he presumably reenacted the activity in her brain, and learned how love feels and works from the inside.

  Harold would grow up to be a promiscuous imitator, and this helped him in all sorts of ways. Carol Eckerman, a psychology professor at Duke, has conducted research suggesting that the more a child plays imitation games, the more likely it is that the child will become an early fluent speaker. Tanya Chartrand and John Bargh found that the more two people imitate each other’s movements, the more they like each other—and the more they like each other, the more they imitate. Many scientists believe that the ability to unconsciously share another’s pain is a building block of empathy, and through that emotion, morality.

  However the science on mirror neurons eventually shakes out, the theory gives us a vehicle to explain a phenomenon we see every day, and never as much as in the relationship between parents and child. Minds are intensely permeable. Loops exist between brains. The same thought and feeling can arise in different minds, with invisible networks filling the space between them.

  Make ’Em Laugh

  One day, months and months later, Julia, Rob, and Harold were sitting around the table at dinner when Rob, absentmindedly, dropped a tennis ball on the table. Harold exploded in peals of laughter. Rob dropped it again. Harold’s mouth opened wide. His eyes crinkled. His body quaked. A little bump of tissue rose between his eyebrows, and the sound of rapturous laughter filled the room. Rob held the ball above the table, and they all sat there frozen in anticipation. Then he let it bounce a few times, and Harold exploded with glee, even louder than before. He sat there in his pajamas, his tiny hands oddly still, transported by laughter. Rob and Julia had tears coming out of their eyes, they were laughing so hard along with him. Rob kept doing it over and over. Ha
rold would stare in anticipation of the ball being dropped and then let rip with squeals of delight when he saw it bounce, his head bobbing, his tongue trembling, his eyes moving delightedly from face to face. Rob and Julia matched him squeal for squeal, their voices blending and modulating with his.

  These were the best moments of their days—the little games of peekaboo, the wrestling and tickling on the floor. Sometimes Julia would hold a little washcloth in her mouth over the changing table, and Harold would grab it and hilariously try to cram it back in. It was the repetition of predictable surprise that sent Harold into ecstasy. The games gave him a sense of mastery—that he was beginning to understand the patterns of the world. They gave him that sensation—which is something like pure joy for babies—of feeling in perfect synchronicity with Mom and Dad.

  Laughter exists for a reason, and it probably existed before humans developed language. Robert Provine of the University of Maryland has found that people are thirty times more likely to laugh when they are with other people than when they are alone. When people are in bonding situations, laughter flows. Surprisingly, people who are speaking are 46 percent more likely to laugh during conversation than people who are listening. And they’re not exactly laughing at hilarious punch lines. Only 15 percent of the sentences that trigger laughter are funny in any discernable way. Instead, laughter seems to bubble up spontaneously amidst conversation when people feel themselves responding in parallel ways to the same emotionally positive circumstances.

  Some jokes, like puns, are asocial and are often relished by those suffering from autism. But most jokes are intensely social and bubble up when people find a solution to some social incongruity. Laughter is a language that people use to bond, to cover over social awkwardness or to reinforce bonding that has already occurred. This can be good, as when a crowd laughs together, or bad, as when a crowd ridicules a victim, but laughter and solidarity go together. As Steven Johnson has written, “Laughing is not an instinctive physical response to humor, the way a flinch responds to pain or a shiver to cold. It’s an instinctive form of social bonding that humor is crafted to exploit.”

  Night after night, Harold and his parents would try to fall into rhythm with one another. Sometimes they failed. Rob and Julia would be unable to get inside Harold’s mind and figure out what he needed to soothe his agony. Sometimes they succeeded. And when they did, laughter was the reward.

  If you had to step back and ask where Harold came from, you could give a biological answer, and explain conception and pregnancy and birth. But if you really wanted to explain where the essence of Harold—or the essence of any person—came from, you would have to say that first there was a relationship between Harold and his parents. And that relationship had certain qualities. And then, as Harold matured and developed self-consciousness, those qualities became individualized, and came to exist in him even when he was apart from his parents. That is to say, people don’t develop first and create relationships. People are born into relationships—with parents, with ancestors—and those relationships create people. Or, to put it a different way, a brain is something that is contained within a single skull. A mind only exists within a network. It is the result of the interaction between brains, and it is important not to confuse brains with minds.

  As Samuel Taylor Coleridge once observed, “Ere yet a conscious self exists, the love begins; and the first love is love of another. The Babe acknowledges a self in the Mother’s form years before it can recognize a self in its own.”

  Coleridge described how his own child, then three years old, awoke during the night and called out to his mother. “Touch me, only touch me with your finger,” the young boy pleaded. The child’s mother was astonished.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “I’m not here,” the boy cried. “Touch me, Mother, so that I may be here.”

  CHAPTER 4

  MAPMAKING

  HAROLD HAD BEGUN HIS LIFE STARING AT MOM, BUT IT WASN’T long before the grubby world of materialism entered the picture. He didn’t begin this phase longing for Porsches and Rolexes. At first, he was more of a stripes man—stripes and black-and-white checkered squares. After that he developed a thing for edges—edges of boxes, edges of shelves. He would stare at edges the way Charles Manson stared at cops.

  Then, as the months went by, it was boxes, wheels, rattles, and sippy cups. He became a great leveler—consumed by the conviction that all matter should rest at its lowest possible altitude. Plates came off tables and onto the floor. Books came off shelves and onto the floor. Half-used boxes of spaghettini were liberated from their pantry prison and returned to their natural habitat across the kitchen floor.

  The delightful thing about Harold at this stage was that he was both a psychology major and a physics major. His two main vocations were figuring out how to learn from his mother and figuring out how stuff falls. He’d look at her frequently to make sure she was protecting him, and then go off in search of stuff to topple. He possessed what Alison Gopnik, Andrew Meltzoff, and Patricia Kuhl call an “explanatory drive.” Harold could sit for long stretches trying to fit different size boxes inside one another, and then when they were finally together, some primeval Sandy Koufax urge would come over him and they’d be flying down the stairs.

  He was exploring and learning, but at this point in his life, Harold’s thought processes were radically different from yours and mine. Young children don’t seem to have a self-conscious inner observer. The executive-function areas in the front of the brain are slow to mature, so Harold did little controlled, self-directed thinking.

  That meant he had no inner narrator that he thought of as himself. He couldn’t consciously remember the past, or consciously connect his past actions to his present ones in one coherent timeline. He couldn’t remember earlier thoughts or how he learned anything. Until he was eighteen months, he couldn’t pass the mirror test. If you put a sticker on an adult chimpanzee’s forehead or a dolphin’s forehead, the animal understands that the sticker is on his own head. But Harold lacked that amount of self-awareness. To him the sticker was on the forehead of some creature in the mirror. He was very good at recognizing others, but he could not recognize himself.

  Even up to age three, children don’t seem to get the concept of self-consciously focused attention. They assume that the mind goes blank when there is no outside thing bidding for its attention. When you ask preschoolers if an adult they are watching is focusing her attention on part of a scene, they don’t seem to understand what you are talking about. If you ask them if they can go long stretches of time without thinking at all, they say yes. As Alison Gopnik writes in The Philosophical Baby, “They don’t understand that thoughts can simply follow the logic of your internal experience instead of being triggered from the outside.”

  Gopnik writes that adults have searchlight consciousness. We direct attention at specific locations. Harold, like all young children, had what Gopnik calls “lantern consciousness.” It illuminated outward in all directions—a vivid panoramic awareness of everything. It was like being exuberantly lost in a 360-degree movie. A million things caught his attention in random bombardments. Here was an interesting shape! There was another! There was a light! There was a person!

  Even that description understates the radical weirdness of Harold’s consciousness at this point. The lantern metaphor suggests that Harold is illuminating and observing the world, and that the observer is somehow separate from what he sees. But Harold wasn’t observing, he was immersing. He was vividly participating in whatever came across his mind.

  The Task

  At this point in his life, Harold had to learn the most the fastest. His job was to figure out what sort of environment he lived in and carve mental maps that would help him navigate it. Conscious, directed learning couldn’t help him perform this task quickly, but unconscious immersion could.

  Much of childhood—much of life—consists of integrating the chaotic billions of stimuli we encounter into sophisticated models, wh
ich are then used to anticipate, interpret, and navigate through life. As John Bowlby wrote, “Every situation we meet with in life is construed in terms of the representational models we have of the world about us and of ourselves. Information reaching us through our sense organs is selected and interpreted in terms of those models, its significance for us and for those we care for is evaluated in terms of them, and plans of action conceived and executed with those models in mind.” Those internal maps determine how we see, what emotional value we assign to things, what we want, how we react, and how good we are at predicting what will come next.

  Harold was in his most intense period of mapmaking. Elizabeth Spelke believes babies are born with a core knowledge of the world, which gives them a head start with this task. Infants know a rolling ball should keep rolling and that if it rolls behind something it should come out the other side. At six months, they can tell the difference between eight and sixteen dots on a page. They have a sense of mathematical proportion, though they obviously don’t know how to count.

  Before long, they are performing impressive acts of decoding. Meltzoff and Kuhl showed five-month-old babies silent videos of a face saying either “ahh” or “eee” and then played the babies audiotapes of each sound. The babies could correctly match the sound to the right face.

  If you read an eight-month-old baby a phrase like “la ta ta” or “mi na na,” within two minutes the baby will pick up the underlying rhyme scheme (ABB). Young children also use a phenomenally sophisticated statistical technique to understand language. When adults speak, all the sounds of the different words run together. But young children are able to discern that there is a high probability that the sound “pre” should go with the sound “ty” so “pretty” is one word. There is a high probability that “ba” will also go with “by” so “baby” is one word. Children can do these sorts of complex probability calculations even though their conscious capacities are barely online.