Heroes Not Zombies

I am he as you as you are he as you are me and we are all together.

We’re still in the midst of a highly atomistic society, as Mary Midgley describes so clearly in books like “Science and Poetry” and “The Myths We Live By”. The thrust of human thought has been to separate, divide and reduce. Consequently there’s a popular conception that we are all separate – that there is a “me” inside my head. We have a sense that each of us are as separate as billiard balls. We might bump into each other, impact on each other, but we don’t spill over into each other.

But it’s all changing. There’s a new paradigm, a new way of thinking on the block, and it’s gaining ground fast.

That new paradigm is the irreducibility of reality, the importance of understanding connections, interactions, complexity. There’s a shift in focus from separate entities to between-ness.

“The Empathic Brain” by Christian Keysers [1932594515] gives an interesting insight into how the discovery of mirror neurons has shown us just how wrong the idea of completely separate, skull-bound minds is. Keysers is one of the pioneer researchers working on the discovery and understanding of mirror neurons.

Here are just two points from his book which might change the way you think about the mind, the self and your relationships.

Firstly, Keysers and others have shown that mirror neurons are involved in producing a phenomenon where the pre-motor strip in our brain becomes active in specific ways. When we see someone carrying out an action, our brain prepares to make our bodies carry out the same action. This might even follow through into the action itself. Have you ever noticed how two people well connected in conversation often mirror each others postures or body movements? Little things like touching one ear, or scratching their nose, where one person does it, and the other immediately mimics the same action. If you ask the people concerned about it, it’s likely they’re not even aware that it’s happening. It’s not that the one thinks “Oh she’s scratching the tip of her nose, I think I’ll scratch mine”!

Secondly, an area of the brain known as the “insula” becomes activated when we empathically respond to another’s emotion. This explains why some people can become quite overwhelmed by another’s emotion. In fact we’re not all the same in this regard. The insula of the most highly empathic people becomes much more active than that of the less  empathic. Again this isn’t something we consciously, rationally choose. The activation of the insula by others’ emotions doesn’t seem to be under our control.

Here are a couple of passages from “The Empathic Brain” –

Imagining actions also increases brain activity in the premotor regions involved in executing similar actions……Thus, during both observation and imagination, our brain uses the premotor cortex to mentally re-enact an action without actually moving the body.

If we interpret the actions of other individuals through our own motor programs, our own motor programs will have a very strong impact on our perception of other individuals.

Empathic people activate their insula very strongly and may be overwhelmed by the vicarious emotions that movies trigger in them. Other people activate their insula only weakly, needing much stronger stimuli to trigger their own feelings.

Through shared circuits, the people around us, their actions and their emotions, permeate into many areas of our brain that were formerly the safe harbours of our identity: our motor system and our feelings. The border between individuals becomes permeable, and the social world and the private world intermix. Emotions and actions are contagious. Invisible strings of shared circuits tie our minds together, creating the fabric of an organic system that goes beyond the individual.

The concepts of the mind as embodied and extended  seem very helpful to me. This work on mirror neurons, interestingly, touches on both of these.