Neurologist and neuroscientist, Marco Iacoboni's compelling new book, Mirroring People is the first book available on the subject of mirror neurons. Iacoboni covers over ten years worth of research, tracing back to where it all began in Parma, Italy. Four scientists who were researching ways to cure brain disorders were unexpectedly alerted to the existence of mirror neurons thanks to a lab monkey and their own astute observations. Mirror neurons are the key to how we learn, communicate, socialize and most importantly, relate to one another. Mirroring People explains how this new knowledge will soon be changing many aspects of future societies for the better.
BookZone: The discovery of mirror neurons has already begun impacting diverse fields of study such as psychology and autism. Since the publication of your book have there been any new experiments going on?
Iacoboni: There are many experiments going on all over the world. Here at UCLA, there is a study that was briefly mentioned in the book but that is not yet completed in which we are looking at the activity of single neurons in the human brain. In collaboration with Dr. Itzhak Fried, a neurosurgeon that developed this amazing technique, we have the opportunity to study patients with epilepsy. Since the patient needs to have electrodes implanted in the brain before the surgeon can perform surgery to improve the disease of the patient, we have the opportunity for a few days to record the activity of individual mirror cells. We have many constraints. It's a very invasive approach and we cannot tell the surgeon where to put the electrodes or for how many days. We can only observe what the clinicians do and then have the opportunity for some hours to test the patients to get some data but it is very exciting data because you get the activity of a single cell in the human brain.
There are also studies that are looking at the development of the system in the human brain. This is difficult because it is not easy to study the developing brain, especially in children. At UCLA, we are looking at adolescents before they reach puberty and then following up with them for about five years. We see how much the brain's system improves and how the activity in the system correlates with the social skills of the kids -- if they are socially competent; if they have lots of friends; or if they are more isolated. We are finding that the more active the mirror neuron system is, the more social the children; we call this a biomarker of sociality. It tells us the propensity for social interaction. We hope that by using interventions that can improve the functions of mirror neurons, for instance imitation, we can improve the condition of children that have problems with social interactions.
BookZone: You note that the human brain has one hundred billion neurons and that only some of them are mirror neurons. Considering that humans are constantly observing and encountering all kinds of actions and facial expressions on a daily basis, does the average brain have more that enough mirror neurons to last a lifetime? Or can mirror neurons be developed over time?
Iacoboni: That is a great question. It is a question that we do not yet know the answer to but we have some ideas about it. The total number of mirror neurons in humans is difficult to estimate, because we typically use brain imaging that cannot measure individual cells. In our estimate so far, it's about fifteen percent of cells that have mirror properties. The rest of the cells do not have mirror properties but they interact and communicate with mirror cells. My hypothesis is that experience really shapes the system; the more you boost activity in your mirror cells, the more mirror cells your brain develops over time.
BookZone: Mirror neurons enable us from a very young age to learn through mimicry, a skill that later plays a role in language, communication and social relations. How do you see the knowledge of the existence of mirror neurons changing future society?
Iacoboni: That is another fascinating aspect of the research because the classical idea is that all of biology is just about self-preservation and individualism; that we become social with the higher order of our intellectual ideas. With the discovery of mirror neurons, we are figuring out something totally different; that in fact, evolution has shaped us to be social. There is some mechanism in our biology that makes us wired for empathy. It's been in our brains but we were not aware of it, we were just doing it. I end the book with a message of hope that with this new awareness, we can actually improve our ability to empathize and build societies that are empathetic and nurturing.
BookZone: You wrote about how philosopher, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, as well as other philosophers, like Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein, had struggled with the idea of self and others. In an essay called, "Eye and Mind," from his book, The Primacy of Perception, Merleau-Ponty wrote:
The enigma that is my body simultaneously sees and is seen. That which looks at all things can also look at itself and recognize, in what it sees, the "other side" of its power of looking. It sees itself seeing; it touches itself touching; it is visible and sensitive for itself.
Iacoboni: It's a great quote and I think it really explains why the research that we are doing on the brain and the discovery of mirror neurons maps so well onto Merlau-Ponty's thinking. Now, with the discovery of mirror neurons, we understand that our brain cells that fire when we do something also fire when we see somebody else doing the same thing; this creates an immediate connection between people. In seeing you, I see myself, my own actions. Incidentally, mirror neurons are not only linked to vision, indeed they also fire when we hear the sound of an action, for instance breaking a peanut. They create a strong correspondence between multiple sensory modalities but above all a strong correspondence between self and others. When you hear about phenomenology, it seems almost like poetry, not philosophy because it doesn't seem to make a lot of sense but Merleau-Ponty was actually right on track about something that an analytic tradition couldn't even consider.
BookZone: I had always wondered why, when I would see someone else's wound - let's say if the person had hurt his or her leg - that I would immediately feel a weird sensation in my own limb, as if I was feeling what I was seeing. Now I know.
Iacoboni: Many people have written about this: Michel de Montaigne; Adam Smith; Friedrich Nietzsche; the link between imitation and empathy. Many writers had this kind of intuition because they were really looking at their own internal experiences when they were describing this phenomenon. Now we know that we have a physiological mechanism that explains how this works. People with introspection who had a very good sense of the human condition had already described this kind of situation but unfortunately the analytical school had dismissed them because it all sounded like literature rather than science.
Professor Marco Iacoboni is currently doing a project on belief in collaboration with writer, Sam Harris. They are researching how the human brain responds to religious and non-religious ideas that it does and does not believe.
