Part of a series exploring how economic thought leads to cognition and cognitive behaviour
Every now and then something strange happens in the field of psychology.
Someone finds evidence of something new. Everyone leaps on the band wagon and applies it to their own exotic niche.
After much rumination, conjecture and a lot of dubious extrapolation (seriously there is always someone who tries to apply any new discovery to a movement in 1970’s cinema that hasn’t even been long forgotten due to it being unknown at the time) everyone fails to apply it to their research and turns to writing papers about how it didn’t even work in the first place.
This has happened with mirror neurons.
A neuron with mirror properties is one that fires both when an individual performs an action or observes another performing that action.
My take on this is that mirror neurons respond to the environment before our concept of self has been formed. Our sense of empathy stems from this. I brought this up with Vittorio Gallese over dinner a couple of years ago who seemed to quite like the idea (but to be honest we spent more time talking about David Bowie’s music!).
So when you see someone bang their shin on something hard you flinch as well. The theory being some of the cells in your brain that have mirror properties have sprung into action and caused you to respond to the environment.
Depending upon who you speak to mirror neurons are anything from the key to our understanding of life to a pernicious fraud perpetrated on the good people of psychology.
Yet again we seem to have missed a trick.
We haven’t asked what our need for neurons with mirror properties is? The rationale being that supporting biological systems is metabolically expensive. Evolution doesn’t account for sentiment. An organism that has to find energy for things it doesn’t need will struggle to outcompete its environment.
Asking what our need for mirror neurons is strikes right at the heart of psychology, maybe before the psyche has even formed.
–
One of the big debates in psychology – i.e. something which we can talk endlessly about without coming to a conclusion – is the concept of free will.
Are we autonomous in our actions or somehow directed by some primeval drive?
To consciously act we have to be aware of an “us” as an entity distinct from the environment. We bind the properties of us into the concept of our self.
We are a “something” that exists within an environment. We can take in information it provides and respond to it. Our sense of self only exists after we take in information from the environment. Therefore, our sense of self is formed at some point after in relation to the environment. I would argue that our “self” only emerges when something affects or impinges upon us.
Think of it this way. A four-stroke combustion engine has – as the name implies – four phases. It sucks in air and fuel, compresses it, ignites and combusts the mixture, then expels the waste.
The useful stuff we get out of the engine – power – happens at stage three, but requires two stages before it.
The useful thing that we get out of the brain is mind. We can only get the brain to produce mind if we can supply it with information from the environment (just as you would fuel and oxygen to an engine). Once we have mind we can bind properties of the environment we exist in together to distinguish us, birds, tree, that person you are trying to avoid, etc (just as you could use power from an engine to do something useful).
The point being that the production of mind is a process.
Once we have mind we can do what we want, but beforehand our responses are not determined by “us”. “You” do not have any control over jumping during a horror movie, despite knowing full well that things aren’t going to end well for the person walking into the basement of a deserted house in the middle of a storm accompanied by an appropriately unnerving soundtrack. Our mirror neurons pick this up from the environment and enact this response before our self is formed and is able to obtain executive control.
We think of the brain as furnishing our existence, but it has to create this rendering from information it receives from the environment. Just as an engine doesn’t produce power instantaneously the brain doesn’t instantaneously produce our self.
Things happen in our brain before we could be aware of them. Logically we could not be aware of the ingredients for awareness.
The brain must being doing something “preconsciously”* before our sense of self is formed.
Mirror neurons (I’m arguing) operate in these stages. If an individual doesn’t or can’t respond to information from the environment their unawareness appear as being unempathetic. There isn’t any magic to them. The magic of our existence is being able to distinguish our self as being distinct from everything else.
Photo credit: © Young-sun Teh
*Preconscious here is different from the meaning that followers of psychoanalysis would attribute to it. From the argument above I would argue that their definition was after mind had been produced but whatever bizarre childhood incident the analyst was attaching importance to was not being actively attended to by the individual.