by Sian Beilock
Just as doctors train their prefrontal cortex to temper their pain responses, we all develop this skill over the course of our lifetime to rein in our emotions in all sorts of harrowing or stressful situations. Math phobics perform better on a math test when they call upon some of the same emotion-regulation processes that doctors do. Likewise, people who have a phobia, say, a fear of spiders, can use strategies to put their fearful reactions in check in order to approach a tarantula—venturing closer and even reaching out and touching their eight-legged terror. How do those with math anxiety and arachnophobia do it? One technique is as simple as writing down your thoughts and worries about the negative event. Writing for even as little as ten minutes helps download those negative thoughts from your mind, making your negative emotions less likely to boil up and distract you from the task at hand.10 In a sense, the writing helps your prefrontal cortex turn down the volume on the loud speaker of your negative reactions.
The point is that our emotions and fears don’t have to get the best of us. We just need to wield tools that can help us temper these negative reactions when they bubble up to the surface and threaten to derail our ability to perform at our best. Medical professionals learn how to do it as a means to separate themselves from their patients’ pain and suffering. We can too.
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Think back to my colleague Jean Decety’s experiment, where he asked people to imagine themselves being caught on the toilet and their mother in the same predicament. Although Decety found that many of the same emotion-laden areas of the brain came alive when people thought about themselves and their mother, there were also some differences. Most striking, activity in the sensory cortex indicated which scenario a person was thinking about. Sitting directly behind the motor cortex, the sensory cortex is the strip of brain that is responsible for receiving incoming messages from our senses—touch, hearing, smell. The sensory cortex is especially active when we think about ourselves rather than someone else, likely because when we think about ourselves we call more directly upon our previous physical experiences.
A closely related bit of brain tissue, the temporal-parietal junction (TPJ) is also important for helping us become consciously aware of whose feelings belong to whom, separating our own feelings and actions from someone else’s. The TPJ receives inputs from our different senses and integrates various pieces of body-related information, helping us to form a holistic picture of how we are feeling. Because of its role as a body monitor, the TPJ is believed to be an important player in our development of theory of mind—our ability to know that our thoughts, actions, and intentions might be different from another’s. Together with the sensory cortex, our TPJ signals when the feelings we have are the result of our own experiences or are just an empathetic reaction to what others may be experiencing.11
Abnormalities in the TPJ and surrounding brain tissue are sometimes associated with autism spectrum disorders.12 This has led to speculation that faulty construction of neural areas that help us differentiate our own actions and intentions from those of others (or, at the very least, a problem in the signals being sent to and from these areas) contributes to autism. People with autism have problems with social interactions, especially understanding the emotions and intentions of others. If you don’t recognize that another person’s actions—say, a smile, frown, or grimace—are similar to those in your own motor repertoire, you will have difficulty making sense of other people’s behavior.
Autism: Broken Mirrors?
Not all children who have been diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show visible signs of a problem. But interactions with them, attempts to engage them in a conversation, for instance, often betray their challenges. A child may avoid your gaze, may not answer normally, and may rock back and forth or even put his head in his hands. Unlike a typically developing child, a child with ASD may not be able to accurately read your facial expression or body postures, and he won’t use your social cues to understand what you are thinking or feeling. If you stick out your tongue in play, he is unlikely to stick out his tongue in imitation, as many other children would. Some children diagnosed with ASD find imitation difficult to do.
The body postures and facial expressions of others are extremely important sources of social information. They tell us about a person’s emotional state, whether he is friend or foe, what he intends to do, and what actions we might take in response. Being able to accurately perceive and recognize social cues displayed by others is key for social interaction, but not everyone can do this. Individuals with ASD (which is estimated to occur in one out of eighty-eight children)13 have great difficulty understanding the social information—especially nonverbal cues—displayed by others. Some scientists believe that this deficit in social processing stems from a broken or faulty mirror neuron system; abnormalities have been found in sensory, motor, and related brain regions that help to initiate our own actions and ascribe meaning to the actions of others by assimilating them with something we have done in the past.14
To study human mirroring, researchers often use an imaging method called an electroencephalogram (EEG); the patient or subject wears a cumbersome cap full of electrodes that transmit signals to a screen to create a picture of the person’s brain waves. For some time now, researchers have known that a specific component of brain waves, called a mu wave, is suppressed when we voluntarily make a movement, such as reaching out to grab a bottle. Although neurons emanating from the sensory and motor centers of the brain fire in sync when people are resting, initiating a movement actually disrupts this synchronicity; as a result, the amplitude of the mu wave plummets (termed mu suppression). Most striking, these mu waves are also blocked when we watch someone else perform an action. Just as the mirror neurons of rhesus monkeys fire when they reach out to grab something and when they watch someone else grab the same thing, your own brain waves that signal action change in predictable (and similar) ways when you act and when you watch someone else act. Given this similarity in mu wave suppression when people perceive and perform actions, researchers believe that the mu wave is a possible indication of mirror neuron activity.
In one experiment, children who wore an EEG cap were asked to grab an object and also to watch videos of other kids grabbing the same object. When normally developing children made the grab, their brain showed the same activity as when they watched others do so. However, the EEGs of children with autism signaled action only when they grabbed the object themselves. It seems that ASD kids don’t always register the actions of other people, at least as an action that they might do themselves.15
Recent evidence indicates that we can learn to suppress our mu waves through biofeedback training. Professor Jaime Pineda of the University of California at San Diego has been exploring whether children diagnosed with ASD can learn to regulate their brain rhythms so they have better control over how they understand and react to others. Pineda has devoted his career to understanding how our brain takes in and processes information from the outside world. If you met Pineda outside his corner office in the modern cognitive science building at the university, you might not know he was a notable neuroscientist. He is very unassuming, with a soft voice, dancing eyes, and a warm smile that give off an air of creativity most folks would associate more with an artist than a scientist. But his creativity is clearly reflected in his outside-the-box research program.
In one study, Pineda recruited local San Diego children who had been diagnosed with ASD to take part in a neurofeedback training program.16 All of the children were high functioning, with generally normal IQ and verbal skills appropriate for their age. Their parents were all members of Valerie’s List, a San Diego Internet autism support group. A few times a week, over a ten-week period, the kids visited Pineda’s laboratory to take part in the training, during which they wore an EEG cap that monitored their brain’s electrical activity. Pineda and his team taught the kids how to control their brain waves using several different video games involving race cars, robots, and space e
xploration. The children learned how to use their thinking to move objects on the screen, for instance, moving a race car around a track. They went through about fifteen hours of training in total. Following the ten weeks, their parents reported positive changes in attention, interactions, and other social behaviors that often go hand in hand with autism (compared with children who didn’t receive the training). If kids with ASD can learn to alter their mu waves, this could prompt development of new therapies for autism. Specifically, these games could be used to reinforce mu suppression both when a child is acting and when he is watching someone else act, positively affecting his ability to navigate his world and successfully interpret the behaviors of those around him.
This loop of behavioral change, from neurofeedback training to a lessening of the symptoms associated with autism, illuminates the power of the body and the corresponding brain signals that control action. When children change their mental patterns, their own behaviors change. Perhaps it helps kids with autism to make meaning out of social interactions when they see that their own actions and the actions of those around them are closely related. Instead of simply seeing a series of body movements when an adult playfully sticks out his tongue, a child can connect the action with meaning and recognize that the adult is thinking about playing and trying to get a playful response.
Many scientists, however, argue that there is still not enough evidence to embrace the idea that an impaired mirror system underlies autism.17 Because autism often goes hand in hand with all sorts of cognitive and motor deficits, it is difficult to be sure that a mirroring issue is really driving the disorder. Something broader may be at work, for instance, a failure to pay special attention to people and their actions that leads to deficits in understanding social information. Though some children with ASD have difficulty imitating others’ actions, some do not. It might be that children with ASD just don’t know when to imitate. It’s as if children with autism are not able to use social cues in order to understand how to behave.
Simply put, kids with ASD process social information differently, not giving it the preference (at least in the brain) that typically developing children do. It seems as if, in the autistic brain, social information is no different from any other sort of information that we encounter. A smile is not recognized as a signal of friendship; it is just the facial muscles moving in a specific way. The brains of children diagnosed with ASD don’t cue into social information the way others do.18 These social missteps seem to be tied to an inability to associate others’ actions with their own. Whether or not this is really about the mirror system still remains to be seen. Regardless, it is clear that our actions form the basis for understanding how others act.
Charles Darwin defined an attitude as a collection of movements, such as a specific posture, that depicts how a person is feeling at a particular time. Sir Francis Galton also talked about attitudes as bodily inclinations. William James believed that the basis of emotions is the bodily experience of emotional states. Our body not only plays a major role in our ability to feel emotions, it also affects how we resonate with the feelings and intentions of the people around us.
CHAPTER 8
The Roots of Social Warmth
In 1957 at the University of Wisconsin Primate Laboratory run by the psychologist Harry Harlow, Jane, a tiny one-day-old rhesus monkey, was separated from her mother. In the wild, this sort of separation would mean almost certain death for the little monkey, but Jane would be taken care of by experienced animal laboratory technicians and be well-fed, warm, and clean. Jane was placed alone in a wire cage so that Harlow and his research team could study the nature of love.
The first signs of love and affection in humans are those between infants and their mother. Much of our ability to emotionally connect and empathize with others is thought to arise from this intimate connection. But what drives the love of an infant for her mother? How does this initial love for our mother translate into our ability as adults to show affection for a lover or a spouse?
In the 1940s and 1950s, when psychology was dominated by theories from psychoanalysis and behaviorism, the conventional wisdom was that the strong attachment between mother and infant was driven mostly by an infant’s most basic need: the need for food, primarily breast milk. Infants were thought to associate their mother with the reduction of hunger, and any feelings of love and affection toward the mother were considered byproducts of this association. Harlow wasn’t convinced of this view. He knew, thanks to Pavlov’s experiments with dogs, that almost anything can become positively associated with food. Every time Pavlov gave his dogs a steak, he would ring a bell. After a while, the dogs began to salivate at the sound of the bell, even when a steak was no longer part of the deal. Importantly, after an even longer while, the bell would stop triggering this salivation effect, and the link between the bell and the meat disappeared. This kind of association seems very different from the love between a mother and child. Even when our mother is no longer our primary provider, human affection doesn’t usually wane. If anything, it strengthens into a lifelong bond. This sort of affection is difficult to explain by the simple satisfaction of basic needs. Harlow wondered if affection in itself was important for healthy development, no less vital than food or water.
Harlow’s ideas were in stark contrast to a popular view of the time, that affection served no real purpose for human development. Parents were often warned that too much affection could lead to psychological issues, not help curb them. “When you are tempted to pet your child, remember that mother love is a dangerous instrument,” wrote John Watson, a leading psychologist of the day.1
Harlow was initially hired by the University of Wisconsin to study the conditions under which rats learn to navigate through mazes to get food, but the university was taking a long time giving him the space he needed to get his rodent work done. After hearing him complain over a dinner party about his nonexistent laboratory, one of his friends suggested he start working with monkeys instead. So Harlow turned a vacant building down the street from the university into state-of-the-art housing for a monkey colony. He had a hard time testing adult monkeys in single cages and found it was easier to work with infants instead. The infants had to be kept in incubators and then in small cages with a piece of cloth diaper on the bottom to absorb the waste.
In contrast to the wire siding, which was hard and cold, the soft cloth diaper attracted the baby monkeys. When the cloths needed to be changed, it wasn’t uncommon for the little monkeys to cling to them and throw temper tantrums, similar to the behavior of human children who won’t go anywhere without a favorite soft blanket or stuffed animal. What was this attachment to the cloth all about? The diapers certainly weren’t fulfilling any of the infants’ basic needs, like water and food.
Harlow thought that the infants might derive psychological comfort from contact with the warm, soft, and furry cloth because it had some of the characteristics of their mother’s body. To test the idea that what he called “contact comfort” was important to the baby monkeys, Harlow conducted an ingenious experiment in which the infants were paired with two different types of surrogate mothers. One was made from a block of wood, covered with spongy rubber and soft cotton terrycloth. This pretend mother also had a 100-watt lightbulb inside that radiated heat. There was even a round piece of wood at the top with marks for two eyes and a nose. The result was something soft and warm. A second surrogate was built out of wire mesh, but without a terry cloth cover. It was hard to cuddle with this second mother, who amounted to not much more than a wire shell.
Each surrogate mother was placed in a different cubicle and both cubicles were attached to the infant monkey’s living quarters so that the infant monkey could easily go back and forth between the mothers. For some of the monkeys, a bottle of milk was attached to the wire surrogate; for other monkeys, the cloth surrogate had the bottle. Strikingly, Jane and the other baby monkeys who were tested chose to spend most of their time clinging to the cloth surrogate mother,
regardless of where the milk bottle was. If the wire surrogate had the milk, the baby would drink as much milk as possible as quickly as possible, and then run back to the cage with the cloth surrogate. When a scary new toy, a mechanical teddy bear beating a drum, was put near the infant, the infant would run to the cloth mother, regardless of whether she provided the milk. It seemed that psychological comfort associated with close contact was a driving force in the development of a monkey baby’s attachment.
In other studies, Harlow raised one group of babies with a warm cloth surrogate mother and another group with a cold wire surrogate; both had a milk bottle attached. Even though the monkeys gained weight at the same rate, those with wire mothers more often had diarrhea and digestion problems. Physical discomfort, especially digestion issues, are often a sign of psychological stress; thus a lack of physical contact comfort seemed to be psychologically stressful for the monkeys.2
We naturally assume that our basic biological needs trump everything else, but Harlow made a striking assertion: the wire mothers who provided milk were “biologically adequate but psychologically inept.” His work is still frequently cited as a prime demonstration of how important close contact between mother and child is in building a child’s healthy psychological disposition. The cloth surrogate was preferred by the baby monkeys because she was furry, soft, and warm, like a real monkey. Being raised by a warm surrogate likely served as a substitute for the missing social warmth of a real mother. Our brain doesn’t always separate the physical from the psychological.