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Thousands of civilians died in Syria in an effort for democracy
Modern western cultures have shifted their focus from groups and classes to the individual and his or her personal right to pursue happiness. Each one of us feels that whatever is within the mantle of our skin is 'self', and whatever is outside is something else, something 'out there'. In this vision of the world, you and I are two separate entities with very little connection between us.
This view of human nature raises a terrible question: is there anything inside us that makes us care about other people? The response of the international community against the Syrian government gives us a positive message: it seems that we do care. Never have there been as many humanitarian actions in the world as today. But if we are disconnected, separate individuals, derived from 'the survival of the fittest' why do we care about other people? Religion for thousands of years gave us an ultimate answer: because God tells us to do so. Here I will show how recent brain science proposes a different, more proximal, and I trust, more universal answer. Evolution has equipped our brains with 'shared circuits' that make us share what other individuals do and feel. These circuits exist because they help us learn from and collaborate with each other. But they have an important side effect: they make us care about others. They equip us with a conscience, that makes us feel that it would be horribly wrong to stay silent while thousands get butchered.
Shared circuits: how you invade my brain
In the 1990's a pivotal discovery was made in the Lab in Parma, Italian, in which I spent 4 years: neuroscientists Giacomo Rizzolatti, Vittorio Gallese, Leonardo Fogassi and their colleagues investigated how the brain controls our actions. Using very thin electrodes, they measured the activity of single neurons in a region of the monkey brain called the premotor cortex. This region contains neurons that are active while the monkey grasps or manipulates objects. Some of these neurons for instance are active when the monkey grasps a peanut, others while the monkey breaks the shell of a peanut. It is the activity of these neurons that triggers the bodily movements of the monkey. Humans also have a premotor cortex and, if a surgeon stimulates this region while a patient is undergoing surgery, the patient reports feeling the urge to perform certain actions. This shows that the premotor cortex is a key element of our voluntary actions, of our personal control over our body - a stronghold of our free will.
The surprise came when my fellow scientists grasped a peanut to give it to the monkey: the very same neuron that responds when the monkey grasps a peanut also responds when the monkey simply sees someone else perform the same action. At first, they did not believe their own finding: how could a brain region that is involved in our voluntary actions respond while we simply watch someone else's? What finally convinced them was the remarkable congruence of these neurons: neurons involved in performing a particular action (e.g. grasping) would respond to the sight of only that particular action. This could not be a coincidence.
Key regions of our Empathic Brain
Later we showed that even the sound of someone else's actions activates neurons involved in executing those particular actions and it became increasingly clear that the brain of the monkey transformed the actions of other people into the motor programs the monkey would use to perform the same actions. We call such neurons 'mirror neurons' because, through them, the motor activity in the brain of the monkey mirrored our actions.
In a number of experiments, we have shown that humans have a similar system: motor representations of our own actions are also activated whenever we see the actions of other people, animals or even robots.
If our own actions are activated while viewing those of others, why don't we always overtly imitate other people? While we observe the actions of others, a neural gate seems to block the output of our motor areas, keeping our bodies from mirroring other people's actions. Behind this gate, our brain can covertly share the actions of the people around us. We no longer only see the actions of others, we feel their actions inside us, as if we were doing the same things. If we are in the starting blocks of a race for instance, the false start of a competitor becomes a contagious action that almost automatically triggers our own movement. When we see people dance, we often cannot help but feel our own legs moving. Our motor system is considered the inner circle of our free will, but each time I witness your actions, you permeate this stronghold. Your actions become mine, and my actions become yours.
This phenomenon is not restricted to actions. When someone taps my shoulder, my somatosensory cortex makes me feel the sensation. Seeing someone else being touched causes the same brain area to be active as when I am touched. If I cut myself on the finger, my cingulate cortex and anterior insula will register the pain, and these areas also become active if I see you cut your finger. These vicarious representations are not quite as strong as those produced while we experience our own sensations, but we nevertheless experience a toned-down version of what the other person feels: I feel a pain-like sensation in my finger when I see you cut yours, and my shoulders itch while I watch a tarantula crawl on James Bond's in the movie Dr No.
Finally, emotions seem to obey a similar rule. When I smell a foul odor, my insula makes me feel disgusted. The very same region is active when I see you look disgusted, as if I am experiencing your disgust. Again, these shared neural activations go hand in hand with our subjective experience: who has never felt his mood improve at the sound of someone else's laugh or felt sad next to a crying friend? The emotions of others are contagious because our brain activates our own emotions at the sight of the emotions of others.
As I describe in my recent book The Empathic Brain (available at CreateSpace in print or Kindle as an ebook) when we see other people's actions, sensations and emotions, a set of our brain circuits seems to transform this sight into a representation of our own actions, sensations and emotions. With these circuits, we no longer simply see other individuals as something 'out there': we feel their actions, sensations and emotions inside us, as if we were in their shoes. Others become us.
Shared circuits allow us to learn from others.
What are these shared circuits good for? If humans result from the 'survival of the fittest', surely they cannot exist just to make us sensitive. The answer is that humans are social animals that owe their success to their capacity to cooperate with and learn from each other. Modern media often glorify the genius of single individuals. Nobel Prizes are given to the inventors of new ideas. Most useful things though such as the spears that helped primordial men get food, and all the technology that keeps us warm, well fed and safe are the results of thousands of years of slow technological improvement that require learning from a more experienced teacher, adding one's own innovation and teaching the improvements to the next generation (the so called ratchet effect). Somehow our brain must be able to learn from others. This process is far from trivial. To learn to make a spear for instance, we have to convert the sight of someone else's actions into something very different - the nerve impulses required to move our own body in a similar fashion. Mirror neurons appear to have solved this difficult task: each time we see an action, they transform this sight into the motor commands necessary to replicate the action. This means that, while we watch an expert perform a series of action components one after another until a spear is made, our brain activates similar action elements in the same order, composing the novel sequence of spear-making from the familiar movements of picking up a stone, a stick, tying the stone to the stick and so on.
Our sharing of other individuals' emotions provides an important element in this process. Virtually all animals learn based on trial and error. While we share the actions and emotions of others, this ancient mechanism becomes social learning. If we see someone try an innovation and be rewarded by success, we will share his reward and take on this innovation as if we had been rewarded for it ourselves. If we see him hurt himself in the process, we share his pain and will refrain from this action that vicariously hurt ourselves just as we stop touching hot plates after burning ourselves.
These brain circuits thus soften the hard divide between your knowledge and mine, and give our brains the basis to download the knowledge of millions of people across time and space. Shared circuits make our experiences fuse into the joint pool of knowledge we call culture. With language, books and television, this sharing becomes global allows us to exchange experiences across time and space.
Shared circuits create an ethical instinct
This internet of minds has another effect. The very same brain areas are active while we share the pain of others and while we feel pain ourselves. This means that the vicarious sharing of other people’s emotions is not an abstract and fragile conscious consideration – it is the heartfelt emotion of our own pain and joy. My decisions are no longer governed by my own pains and pleasures alone. I act with yours at heart as well. My fate and your fate become deeply linked. Shared circuits lay the foundation for an intuitive and deeply engrained altruism.
Most cultures have what is called a golden rule of ethics. Christianity for instance states that ‘In everything, do to others as you would have them do to you’ (Matthew 7:12) while Islam holds that ‘Not one of you truly believes until you wish for others what you wish for yourself’ (Muhammad, 13th Hadiths of Nawawi). I believe that the brain mechanisms that make us share the pain and joy of others are the neural bases that intuitively predispose us according to this maxim. Our brain is ethical by design.
This is not to say that we are angels, driven by empathy alone. We sometimes harm people, because our own necessities outweigh the pains of others. We often fail to help others because protecting our own personal safety outweighs our empathy. Distance is a further barrier to empathy. Had Bashar al Assad killed that many people in our own neighborhood, we would have readily endangered our own lives to save them. Because the people of Syria are thousands of miles away, all we do is send a strong message. But all that said, in this world of great sufferance, I find a small but vital hope in the fact that evolution is not entirely cold-hearted.
We feel outraged by what happens in Syria, and finally start acting. I trust there are a thousand reasons ranging from ethics to international safety to prevent crimes against humanity. I often, however, felt pessimistic about how deeply these considerations will drive people to act. I now found a source of optimism. Biology has equipped us with the gift to relate to others and with it, the whisper of conscience. Surely, this biological drive, together with all the other considerations, will serve us better than intelect alone.
Christian Keysers is a Professor for Social Brain at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience. He is one of the scientists that discovered the biology of why we care about others. Learn more about this fascinating new science of empathy in his book The Empathic Brain. You can acquire the book in print at CreateSpace or as an eBook at Kindle or Smashwords.
