I remember being told by my father not to catch anyone’s eyes when walking down a big city street. If we catch another person’s eyes, we might truly see who they are, but we’d also be seen by them; we’d become vulnerable. Seeing and being seen are linked. The look we give and the one we get are two sides of one reality.

 

Likewise, most of us have experienced yawning when we see another person yawning. Or felt tears coming to our eyes when we saw someone weeping– or felt bad when we noticed someone else feeling bad. Maybe for a similar reason, simply smiling can make us feel more like– smiling. Why is that?

 

In the book Ethical Wisdom: What Makes Us Good, the author, Mark Matousek details how “a newborn baby, barely able to see, can imitate the facial expression of adults within one hour of delivery.” When the child imitates a caregiver, this creates a coupling between the baby’s expressions, its emotions, and the other person. When a baby sees its mother or guardian, it waits for the other to see it. And when she does see him, her, or them, the baby lights up.

 

Science fascinates me. Or maybe it’s the ability to closely study reality and recognize patterns and connections underlying what drives us to do what we do or feel what we feel. It can help us perceive the universe more “objectively,” meaning relatively free from the enclosure of ego, or without too many of our biases and personal stories getting in the way.

 

When I was teaching Psychological Literature for high school students, we read chapters in books by neuroscientist V. S Ramachandran, especially The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human. This book exemplified what I loved about science. It talked about so many topics that expanded our imagination and understanding of our humanity. It introduced us to imposter’s or Capgras syndrome, where we look at a person we know well, like our spouse or parent, and experience them as a stranger. Or synesthesia, which is when we blend our senses, so we might taste colors, see sounds, or hear shapes.

 

Students both loved the reading and yet had trouble believing the power of our brain to both expand our sense of ourselves or distort how we experienced the world.

 

It introduced us to one of the most fascinating discoveries in recent memory, the discovery of cells in the brain called mirror neurons. This discovery so captured the imagination of many people that it led to intense speculation; both scientists and non-scientists drawing conclusions before the science could catch up with our yearning for answers. I felt if the discovery hadn’t been made, someone would have had to make it up. As a result, attacks on the science began, and the whole subject went from the bright lights of headlines to the darkness of doubt and anger.

 

In the 1990s, a group of Italian scientists led by Giacomo Rizzolatti, at the University of Parma, discovered something weird. They were studying monkey behavior. When a monkey noticed an object, or interacted with it, for example reaching out their hand to grasp a peanut, certain sets of neurons fired. These same neurons also fired when the monkey watched other monkeys doing the same thing. In other words, they were understanding what the other was doing through having their own neurons fire as if they were doing it. They were “reading the other’s mind” by modeling themselves doing the action. Ramachandran described these neurons as virtual reality simulators provided by nature to help us understand the intention of others. They were natural empathy generators.

 

One of my students asked, if we can so model the actions of others, how come we don’t repeat them? Why don’t we constantly walk around imitating others?…

 

*To read the whole article, please go to The Good Men Project: