Brain reading goes on all the time. How many times each day? The answer is hundreds. Statements such as, “He is depressed,” “The president is planning to oppose the budget,” “The Council members ignored X, Y, and Z when they reduced taxes,” “He avoids me because we compete,” and “She plans to seduce him,” stem in part from brain reading. Although at times we struggle to understand others, the majority of time, our sense that we are reading their mental states is automatic and effortless. Little notice is taken of the process.
In the academic literature, brain reading builds on a number of assumptions and preconditions, such as one must be aware of the products of one’s brain before recognizing those of other brains and others have brains by analogy to one’s own brain.6 Preconditions include introspection, cognitive and emotional development, and the ability to infer from evidence and to imitate others.7 These are far from primitive brain operations. Indeed, if the assumptions and preconditions accurately depict what is required to brain read, a highly sophisticated brain is at work.
That we often believe that we know ourselves and others is understandable. We sense we know our own brain states and the causes of our actions. Others also believe they know themselves. We share what we believe with others, and they do likewise. Moreover it is often easy to surmise what is going on in the brains of others: a mother observing her child snitching a cookie from cookie jar is unlikely to misinterpret events taking place in her child’s brain.
Research findings are consistent with the view that children are endowed with capacities to brain read.8 Findings also suggest that upbringing environments significantly influence the refinement of these capacities. Studies conducted decades ago by Rene Spitz and Harry Harlow offer striking examples. Spitz studied the developmental consequences to children deprived of normal maternal care.9 Harlow separated infant monkeys from their mothers and then evaluated their maternal and social behavior as adults when they were reunited with members of their species.10 In both studies the effects were similar: socially deprived infants failed to develop into normal adults and exhibited major deficits in the ability to relate to members of their own species.
Other studies suggest that brain reading is compromised in certain mental disorders and following certain brain injuries.11 Compromise also seems to be the case when interacting with persons suffering from schizophrenia: what they say and how they behave are unpredictable and difficult to interpret. Whether nonhuman primates can brain read is a controversial topic, although there is suggestive evidence.12 Studies using fMRI designed to identify areas of the brain that are activated during brain reading remain difficult to interpret because of the many areas of the brain that respond to the wide range of experimental challenges used in such studies.13 Given the networked structure and the often multiple functions of specific brain areas, these findings are not unexpected.
Brain reading has clear implications for beliefs and divides. It describes one of the many processes contributing to their formation and management. A generous guess is that our representations of others’ brain states are approximately accurate 30 percent of the time, although I know of no evidence to support this guess. Whatever the percentage, readings can quickly become beliefs. As to divides, narrowing occurs in almost all instances. It occurs even when two or more brain states are considered such as, “S is either depressed or in pain.” In effect, S’s possible brain states have been narrowed to two from many, many possibilities.
Views about the brain states of others can change. A personal experience provides an amusing example.
Years ago, while studying monkeys in a foreign country, I was asked by the principal of the local school to give a talk about the purpose of our research. The audience would be members of the senior class. I accepted the invitation.
Developing a view of the students’ beliefs seemed easy. I had met some of them. They had asked about the research and were curious about what we were trying to discover. These interactions served as direct evidence from which I inferred that they shared my view that monkeys and humans derive from a common ancestor. The view soon became a belief with a narrow divide.
That I looked forward to the talk was clear. Considerable time was spent in its organization and rehearsal.
I arrived at the school. Students filed into the classroom and sat quietly. I was introduced.
The talk began with a discussion about the members of the research group. It then turned to evolution and the idea that humans and the monkeys living in the hills nearby shared a common ancestor. I drew a tree of life on the blackboard and pointed out some of the critical points of hominid evolution over the ensuing millions of years. The talk finished with examples of how humans and the monkeys share many anatomical, physiological, and behavioral features.
As the talk proceeded, I sensed that the students were unreceptive, although no one spoke up. Both the students and the teachers were attentive. No one went to sleep, yawned, or left the classroom. The talk ended when I asked if there were any questions.
An eerie two minutes of silence passed as I stood in front of the audience anticipating questions. There were none.
The silence was finally broken when the principal said: “Thank you very much. We don’t believe anything you’ve said.”
The teacher and students departed from the classroom.
The challenge had failed. I hadn’t detected that I would be talking to a group in which literally all of its members were religious fundamentalists. My belief was discarded.
As wrong as our brain readings can be, is there an alternative option for navigating the social environment? A possible 30 percent accuracy is certainly better than a lower percentage. Further, an inescapable consequence of group living is that decisions need to be made and actions need to be taken. Many are contingent on reading the brain states of others.14 For these reasons, the brain states of others are of equal importance to our own.
To reverse engineer some of these points to our ancestors of two hundred thousand years ago, several things seem likely. First, the capacity to surmise the brain states of others was already present. The child of those years wasn’t born with a brain that was a “blank slate”—essentially without partially innate information-processing and behavioral predispositions.15 Rather, much as is the case today, children were born with systems to process, use, and manipulate information dealing with social relationships and for navigating their physical worlds.16 Second, views resulting from brain reading often became beliefs. Third, brain reading meant that some group members would be preferred to others. Such preferences would favor the development of small groups composed of members with positive assessments of each other. The opposite is also likely: unshared preferences were a factor when individuals disliked or mistrusted one another.
MIRRORING
A friend describes an incident.
Friend: “It made my stomach turn. There he was, an extremely accomplished poet reading his poems to an appreciative audience. Then a heckler began interrupting with crude comments about his work. I was disgusted and mad. I could see his response in his face and body. They tightened up. He looked away. Then there was a look of anger. I was in the first row. It was as if I could feel what he was feeling.”
Author: “And then what happened?”
Friend: “He continued to read and not respond. Then the audience began to yell at the heckler and the reading stopped. The heckler went quiet and we assumed he would shut up. The reading started again, and again the heckler started yelling.”
Author: “And?”
Friend: “Mad as I was, what overwhelmed me were my feelings. It was strange, almost as if I were him, in his shoes, so to speak, the target of the attack. I hurt and I began fidgeting. Then I felt like shouting. Then some university police officers arrived and escorted the heckler away from the reading. The reading continued, but I remained agitated ’til late that evening.”
My friend was describing mirroring, which works as follows. Person A observes per
son B’s behavior. Neurons in person A’s brain that are the same as those responsible for the same behavior in the brain of person B are activated. In effect, a kind of “copycat” response by the neural cells of an observer in response to what is observed—hence the term mirror neurons.17
As with brain reading, mirroring appears to be a partially innate capacity that, when refined, operates without awareness or perceived intent on the part of an observer. The process is consistent with the view that the brain is responsive and often controlled by environmental information—the extended brain hypothesis mentioned earlier. (Mirroring is a likely factor in the success of theatre and movies, which can affect the brains of audiences much as do the face-to-face experiences of daily life.)
Although there are those who are skeptical of the phenomenon,18 research findings strongly suggests that both humans and nonhuman primates possess the capacity. In the cortex of monkeys, single-electrode recordings reveal that mirror neurons fire when a monkey performs a specific action or when the monkey views another agent performing the same action.19 For monkeys, the other agent can be another monkey or a human being. Studies using fMRI reveal that the human brain regions that contain mirror neurons are active when a person views another’s goal-directed action or emotional state.20 More complex behaviors, such as subtle forms of social rejection, have led to similar findings and interpretations.21 As with brain reading, studies of mirroring reveal that many parts of the brain respond to what is observed. This is to be expected.22
No one has suggested that mirroring is 100 percent accurate. Nor is it assumed to work the same way with everyone.23 Childhood experiences may sensitize the brain to particular behavior by others. Further, the process is not easily unlearned or constrained. Exercising constraint is one of the tasks facing young medical personnel who must learn to remain professionally focused when viewing individuals who have been severely damaged physically or who are in great emotional distress.
An obvious but as yet unanswered question is whether mirroring contributes to belief. It has been suggested that it does:24 for example, it is easy to imagine that the mirror-neuron activity of a person observing another person in pain initiates events leading to the belief that the observed person is in pain. As with brain reading, such connections initially take place outside awareness.
Are there similarities between brain reading and mirroring? Yes. Both involve the processing of external information. There are also differences. The information processed by mirror neurons may be limited to moments during which observations occur. In principle brain reading can occur separately from observations as during moments in which information that has already been acquired is developed into representations. There are also potential downsides to both capacities. For example, mirroring and brain reading may enhance the effectiveness of deception: neurons responding to a behavior by others but not detecting its deceptive intent may invite erroneous responses and beliefs.
What of divides? Mirroring should narrow them for observers. Exceptions may occur however. For example, widening might take place if a person who is deemed to be a deceiver is also in pain. This could initiate a competition between the view of the person and mirroring, leading to divide widening—in effect, an unperceived variant of cognitive dissonance where a person is dealing with conflicting beliefs.25 Is the person being observed really in pain or deceiving or both?
Backward extrapolation suggests that mirroring is an ancient trait, perhaps millions of years old. This is a strong inference from studies revealing its presence among nonhuman primates. As with the other systems, mirroring no doubt went through multiple stages of refinement. Because it replicates activity in specific areas of the brains of observers, it likely fostered sensitivity to others during the early moments of group development. This would have increased the probability of social cohesion, such as assisting others in distress. Or at moments when the joy of others is contagious, one may find oneself giggling.
ATTRIBUTION
As a youth, I spent a month each summer visiting my mother’s parents in Mojave, California. Mojave was then a small town of no more than a thousand people. After several visits, I came to know the few boys my age who lived there year around. So when I arrived for my visit at age nine, my friendships from previous summers were easily renewed. It was with my friends that I spent much of my time.
One afternoon they took me to see “the haunted house.”
It had its own story. The house had belonged to a prospector who had disappeared years earlier. No one knew why. A mailbox in front of the house was always empty. Coyotes and stray animals were often observed on the grounds.
What I saw was consistent with what I was told. An uprooted tree was on its side in the yard. Vines covered most of the house and roof. Pieces of siding had fallen to the ground. Newspapers, broken sawhorses, worn out tires, and garbage cluttered the property. A window was broken.
In the month prior to my visit, local interest in the house had escalated. A large parcel appeared on its front porch and remained there for weeks. Then it disappeared. A local resident claimed she had seen smoke coming from the chimney. A few days later, another resident claimed the blinds in the windows had changed height. One evening, an elderly couple ran out of gas near the house. While waiting for help, they heard strange noises. Three nights later, a light was observed in a window. In the weeks that followed, several people observed “ghostlike figures” near the house at twilight. That settled matters for many of the local residents. Those who had been skeptical that the house was haunted were now convinced.
I checked the story with my grandmother. What I had heard and seen was accurate: “People in the town are scared, and so am I,” she said, along while strongly cautioning me to “Stay away from that house!”
Several days later, the police searched the house and found no evidence of its occupation. There were no recent footprints or tire tracks on the grounds. No ashes were found in the fireplace. The local fuel distributor verified that he hadn’t made a delivery for years. The electric meter was unchanged from previous months.
For a week after the police released their findings, there were no reports of unusual sightings. Then one evening, a highly respected local businessman and his wife drove by the house and saw “at least four ghostlike figures moving in and out of the bushes.”
Three days later, the house burned to the ground. Evidence of arson was found. A less-than-thorough police investigation failed to identify suspects. The ghostlike figures disappeared for two years, and then they returned.
Attribution is one of the brain’s systems for endowing attributes and explaining the behavior of oneself, others, and events.26 It can be added to the list of mostly innate brain capacities, such as breathing and brain reading, which operate without perceived intent. At times it has been referred to as “agenticity.”27 It is one of the brain’s ways for making sense out of the social, animal, and physical worlds. Its evolution among modern humans is assumed to be similar to that for imagining, belief, and brain reading: requisite systems were present among our ancestors and refined over time.
Attribution differs from brain reading and mirroring. Brain reading involves developing representations of the brain states of oneself and others that sometimes lead to beliefs. Mirroring is about the brain neurons of observers that are activated while observing others, which also sometimes lead to beliefs. Attributions are about assigning properties or causal inferences about why and how actions or events occur. Often beliefs and divides are in place when this happens. For example, “He quit his job because he hated his boss.” “He converted to Catholicism to marry Jane.” “The roof collapsed because of the weight of the snow.”
Attributions may be internal or external. Those that are internal are assigned to one’s personality and preferences and, more recently, to one’s genes and possible inherited traits. People create clusters of attributes about themselves, believe them, and take them seriously. Such activity is associated with the belie
f that there is a self. For example, self-attribution is a likely explanation for the belief that God is personally involved in guiding one’s life.28 Groups often engage in similar self-attributions. Not surprisingly, how we see ourselves and others rarely map to how others see themselves or us.29
External attributions are those that are assigned to others, events, and contexts.30 In their simplest form, external attributions work this way. From a variety of sources including direct and indirect evidence, brain reading, mirroring, beliefs, memory, and imaginings, person A develops representations about person B. The representations are then attributed—“projected,” in a descriptive sense—to person B. That is, they become “properties” of person B. Person A then interacts with person B or explains person B’s behavior based on his attribution. For example, person A attributes loving motives to person B and explains B’s kindness to others as due to B’s loving motives. Seeing what one believes is a form of attribution.
There is an obvious circularity to these happenings.
Attributions are not limited to humans. Typically those dealing with inanimate objects, such as automobiles, dishwashers, and lawn mowers, are more precise compared to those about humans. The workings of machines can be described in detail and causal explanations can be tested: for example, “The lawn mower won’t run because the carburetor is clogged.” They also apply to animals. Folk-medicine views regarding the medicinal properties of animal parts provide a disquieting example of the consequences for species survival due to questionable attributions. For nonhuman primates, the number of species that are routinely sacrificed to obtain body parts are as follows: Neotropics = 19 of 139 species; Africa = 25 of 79 species; Madagascar = 10 of 93 species; Asia = 47 of 79 species.31
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