• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 354 0

to imitate it. I can remember visiting in Moscow back in the cold war days, and being struck that there were no colors anywhere in the city. The sky was gray, the houses were gray, the cars were gray, and the faces of the people I passed on the streets were unrelentingly pale. But what really stood out for me the most was that virtually no one was smiling. As I walked along, I’d give the other pedestrians in Mos cow a quick smile of acknowledgment, and time and again, I’d get back nothing in return. At first, this was amusing (because it was so strange), but after about an hour, I started to realize the effect it was having on me. My mood changed. I wasn’t feeling my usual lighthearted self. I’d quit smiling. I felt borderline grim. I felt gray. Physically and psychologically, without even realizing it, I’d been mirroring everyone else around me.

Mirror neurons explain why we often smile when we see someone who is happy or wince when we see someone who is in physical pain. Scientist Tania Singer scanned subjects’ brains as they watched another person experience physical pain, and found that those subjects’ “pain-related” regions—including the fronto-insular and anterior cingulated cortices—came alive. It seemed that by the mere observation of another person’s pain, these subjects felt the pain as if it were their own.

Interestingly, mirror neurons are also at work when the opposite takes place—on those occasions when, in what is known as schadenfreude, we actually take pleasure in others’ bad luck. Singer and her colleagues showed volunteers a clip of people playing a game. Some players cheated; others played fairly, by the rules. Next, the volunteers looked on as some of the players—both the cheaters and the noncheaters—were given a mild but painful electric shock.3

Thanks to mirror neurons, the pain-related regions in both the male and female brains lit up in empathy when the noncheaters` experienced the shock. But when the cheaters were shocked, the male subjects’ brains not only showed less empathy, their reward centers actually lit up (the women in the group still maintained a noticeable level of empathy). In other words, we all tend to empathize when bad things happen to good people—in this case the noncheaters—but when bad things happen to bad people—the cheaters—men, at least, actually experience a degree of pleasure.

Yawn. Are you yawning now, or feeling the initial stirrings of yawning? I am, and not because I’m bored, or tired of writing about the brain, but simply because I just typed the word Yawn. You see, mirror neurons become activated not only when we’re observing other people’s behavior, they even fire when we’re reading about someone performing it.

Recently, a team of researchers at UCLA used an fMRI to scan subjects’ brains while they read phrases that described a host of actions like “biting the peach” and “grasping a pen.” Later, when the same subjects observed videos of people performing these same two simple actions, the identical cortical regions of the brains lit up.4 If I simply write the words “nails scratching on a chalkboard” or “sucking on a lemon” or “giant hairy black widow spider,” chances are good that you’ll wince, recoil, and otherwise squirm while reading them (your mind visualizes that painful sound, the bitter taste of the lemon wedge, those furry legs edging along your calf). Those are your mirror neurons at work. Unilever executives told me once that during a focus group they were conducting on a new shampoo, they noticed consumers would begin scratching their heads whenever a member of the team said the word scratch or scratching. Mirror neurons again. According to the results of one fMRI study, “When we read a book, these specialized cells respond as if we are actually doing what the book character is doing.”5

In short, everything we observe (or read about) someone else doing, we do as well—in our minds. If you saw me tripping and falling headfirst down a flight of stairs, your mirror neurons would fire up, and you would know precisely how I feel (even though you’re not half