I feel your pain
New proof of "mirror neurons" explains why we experience the grief and joy of others, and maybe why humans are altruistic. But don't call us Gandhi yet.
By Gordy Slack
Nov. 5, 2007 | A young woman sat on the subway and sobbed. Her mascara-stained cheeks were wet and blotchy. Her eyes were red. Her shoulders shook. She was hopeless, completely forlorn. When I got off the train, I stood on the platform, paralyzed by emotions. Hers. I'd taken them with me. I stood there, tears streaming down my cheeks. But I had no death in the family. No breakup. No terminal diagnosis. And I didn't even know her or why she cried. But the emotional pain, her pain, now my pain, was as real as day.
Recent research in neurobiology would explain my response as the automatic reaction of a kind of brain cells known as mirror neurons. On Nov. 4, neuroscientists announced that mirror neurons had for the first time been directly identified in humans. Previously their existence had only been inferred from primate research and the observation of human brains through fMRIs (functional magnetic resonance imaging).
Enthusiasm among scientists has been spreading as growing evidence suggests that "mirrors" may explain the roots of human empathy and altruism as well as provide insight into such disorders as autism and even schizophrenia. But that's not all. In the past few years, dozens of studies have linked mirror neurons to the emergence of language, abstract reasoning and even self-awareness or consciousness. "The self and the other are just two sides of the same coin. To understand myself, I must recognize myself in other people," says Marco Iacoboni.
Sound like Marin County, Calif., Buddhism? Maybe so. But it's also SoCal neurobiology. Iacoboni is a neuroscientist and professor of psychiatry at UCLA, where he directs the Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center. "We are hard-wired to feel what others experience as if it were happening to us," he says. Down the road in San Diego, Vilayanur Ramachandran, director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at UCSD, offers, "We used to say, metaphorically, that 'I can feel another's pain.' But now we know that my mirror neurons can literally feel your pain."
Iacoboni's "hard-wiring" is a network of ordinary-looking neurons distributed throughout the brain. Unlike other kinds of brain cells, such as motor neurons, which control muscles, mirror neurons fire both when a person is in action, and when he or she observes someone else engaged in the same action. Before the discovery of mirror neurons, cognitive scientists assumed that we gained access to the feelings of others by theorizing about them. Now we know that a direct experience is responsible for much of what we thought was computation, speculation, memory or inference. Through my mirror neurons, the young woman cries in the same part of my brain where I do.
Not all scientists believe that mirror neurons represent "a great leap forward," as Ramachandran has written. Alison Gopnik, a developmental psychologist at U.C. Berkeley's Institute of Cognitive and Brain Sciences, flatly labels mirror neurons a myth. But her voice is drowned out by an academic chorus of mirror hosannahs.
If Ramachandran, Iacoboni and hundreds of other neuroscientists now poring over mirror neurons are correct, directly sharing the experience of others is a key to who and what we are, how our brains and minds evolved, and how they develop from childhood. Compassion and empathy, feeling the experience of another, is not just something we're capable of, it is woven into the fabric we are cut from. "Mirror neurons dissolve the barrier between you and someone else," says Ramachandran. He calls them "Gandhi neurons."
Along with dozens of studies in neuroscience journals, mirror neurons have also taken a place in the folk psychology battle over how to frame human nature. Alan Greenspan and the rugged individualists may love Ayn Rand's libertarian vision of each person alone against the world, but another set prefers to think of humans as inextricably tied to one another, creating codependent realities and sharing inter-subjective space.
In fact, the problem of altruism has vexed biologists since Darwin. Why do people sacrifice their own self-interest, sometimes even their lives, in order to help others? Genes for such behavior should be selected against quickly and definitively. But if mirror neuron theorists are right, the advantages of directly understanding others may be so great that it blows the evolutionary cost of occasional self-sacrifice out of the water. What's selected for might be the ability to imitate others, and to understand and feel what they are feeling. Self-sacrifice and altruism might be mere byproducts of mirroring and not themselves adaptive in a way selected for by evolution. In any case, "we are good," says Iacoboni, "because our biology drives us to be good."
Next page: That a kind of neuron alone could explain empathy makes no sense