Mirror neurons and early learning

How do children learn?

Humanity in the Mirror — Neurons.

Scientific thinking, a thinking which looks on from above, and thinks of the object-in-general, must return to the "there is" which precedes it; to the site, the soil of the sensible and humanly modified world such as it is in our lives and for our bodies ... Further, associated bodies must be revived along with my body—"others," not merely as my congeners, as the zoologist says, but others who haunt me and whom I haunt; "others" along with whom I haunt a single, present, and actual Being as no animal ever haunted those of his own species, territory, or habitat. In this primordial historicity, science's agile and improvisatory thought will learn to ground itself upon things themselves and upon itself, and will once more become philosophy...

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Eye and Mind.

The discovery of mirror neurons

The experiment was ground-breaking because it showed infant imitation of adults at a much earlier age than was thought possible.

The discovery of mirror neurons solved a riddle, an anomaly, that annoyed (some) researchers for decades: the newborn's ability to ape the behaviour of adults, to mimic adult's gestures and expressions before they even learned them. This inner theater starts its shows as early as infancy; probably even earlier, in the case of echo neurons.

In 1977, Science published the ground-breaking paper "Imitation of Facial and Manual Gestures by Human Neonates" by Meltzoff, who was still at Oxford, and M. Keith Moore of the University of Washington.

Infants between 12 and 21 days of age can imitate both facial and manual gestures; this behavior cannot be explained in terms of either conditioning or innate releasing mechanisms. Such imitation implies that human neonates can equate their own unseen behaviors with gestures they see others perform.¹

The experiment was ground-breaking because it showed infant imitation of adults at a much earlier age than was thought possible. Jean Piaget, for instance, had thought that infants reached the stage of facial imitation at 8 to 12 months. The study also showed early facial imitation, something previously thought to be impossible at this young age because of its necessarily crossmodal nature. (Infants can see others' faces but not their own; they can feel their own facial movements, but not those of others.) The findings had implications not only for theoretical psychology, but also for the study of memory, learning, language acquisition, and socialization.

The organ of innate knowledge

The implications are fundamental indeed: Meltzoff and Moore discovered a neurological organ that apparently allowed human beings learn by imitation even when there wasn't the slightest element to base the comparison, the imitation, on. The discovery presents problems as fundamental as those posed by Plato. Plato, the idealist, argued that we learn because we remember, or 'recollect' knowledge that the 'soul' had before we were born; that is, that what we see or experience not only provides material for knowledge but activates memories of what we've seen before.

At the other end of the philosophical spectrum, the materialist, indeed behaviorist, explanation is that learning functions through painstaking trials and errors. According to John Locke and all the others before and after him ² who believe that the child comes into the world as a tabula rasa or blank slate (and, worse, one with a tendency towards evil³). On this understanding of child development, all skills and feelings worthy of those names are learnt one tiny step after the other. But where are the errors in these early and immediate reproductions of manual gestures and facial expressions?

Thirty years after Meltzoff and Moore, neuroscience just happened to discover, by chance, the seat where, in the brain, empathy and imitation learning, reflection and abstract thinking, are located — the location of this mirror that allows us to reflect. Empathy neurons ('mirror neurons' and 'echo neurons') allow the Other to find home in the Self. When we think about the Other, mirror neurons activate and showcase the Other as if it were Me.

If empathy neurons are constitutive of the Human race, what can be said, for instance, of the empathy neurons of autists or sociopaths? Research shows that theirs are indeed affected, either because of the passage of time and environmental influences, or because of the 'genetic lottery'. But in fact, all aren't equal, in terms of empathy.⁴

The empathic child in the 'real world'

Only human beings make the error of altruism.
Richard Dawkins⁵

Studies using Kohlberg's scale of moral reasoning conclude with a depressing diagnosis: rarely do people grow beyond self-centeredness , the stages 1 and 2 of moral reasoning. Some access to the stages 3 and 4, in which good is so because it conforms to the majority's will.

How can it be, if we all come to earth with this bothersome ability to ape others?

In actuality, a mirror neuron handicap may help to cope, in society. Empathy hurts. Depression, the most common mental disorder, is strongly associated with an empathy system on overdrive, and dysfunctional feelings of interpersonal guilt (fully conscious or not)⁶ This finding goes against the age old belief promoted by Freudians that guilt is a necessary consequence of punishable egocentric pulsions (such as incestuous desires). In the context of evolutionary psychology, interpersonal guilt is the type of suffering that signals to individuals that other members of the group needs succour; the persistence of depression proneness in humans across generations results from the fact that altruism genes (not selfish genes!) are conserved because they help in the survival of cooperative groups. The rising rates of depression suggests amongst other things⁷ that society is maladapted to Human's need for cooperation, as we'll see in greater details.

When we experience unbearable moments of empathy, regions of the prefrontal cortex come to the rescue to silence our empathy neurons. Those "super-empathy neurons", that should be called, more accurately, anti-mirror neurons, help us to dissociate from this part of ourselves that is called Others — to preserve ourselves.

Neuroscientist Dr. Marco Iacoboni studies mirror neuron activities in the brain and has found that we do indeed build up a sort of cognitive resistance to our empathetic neurophysiological responses whether reporters covering the case, forensic scientists or citizens who choose to tune the coverage out. “The prefrontal cortex controls these ‘monkey see, monkey do’ cells and we’ve coined these ’super mirror neurons’ because they do inhibit mirror neuron activity,” says the UCLA-based neurologist, known as Mr. Mirror Neuron due to his focused studies on the neural mechanisms of empathy and imitation.⁸

And this is how children, in society, are being tamed. At the moment when they should be protected from Evil, they are exposed to it as if it was important, unavoidable, to confront them with it. As the artists say, there's a second degree, it's an artistic expression, etc.

The sociopolitical role of horror: panem et circenses

Violence is one of the most fun things to watch.
Quentin Tarantino

Horror's purpose, in human cultures, is to cultivate stupefaction in masses (also see BBC's The Power of Nightmares and the demonstration of Bernstein.⁹) It was confirmed, for instance, that exposure to television violence causes social isolation in viewers.¹⁰ It is known already that indifference to others is learnt through violence exposure. Violence on the screens is actually recognized today as a major threat to publich health.¹¹

Panem et circenses, "bread and games" (or "circuses"), is our cultural motto, not because we love fast food as well as clowns and acrobats, but because we are (whether we like it or not) under the fascination of those modern versions of the Roman gladiator combats. Circenses actually refers to nothing else than to the staged horrors of the Roman Empire.

Since the dawn of civilization, adults inflict on their own children, generally in a ritualized form, traumatic doses of horror to teach them how to live in a violent and unfair world. That's what Alice Miller and others called 'black pedagogy'.¹² Today, we call it entertainment. Underlying this behaviour is the belief, formalized by Aristotle, that arts such as theater should help man to rid of its lowest instincts. Not predicted by Aristotle and Co. was the fact that they may also help rid of Human's highest instinct — the instinct of empathy.

Treatment

In a nutshell, the empathy-impaired overflow the brains of their healthy counterparts with horror as if it was information or entertainment (as it is perceived by autists). Trauma, as he have shown, triggers the (over)development of super-(anti-)mirror neurons, and so on. The transmission of egotism through this route of propagation is epidemic.

However, it is now possible to see as they are the crowds of sociopaths of everyday life, those for whom life in society is a strategic choice, not a natural inclination. It is visible now that those freaks of... culture compensate a hole in the head with shaky, unnatural, neurological scaffoldings.¹³
Carracci, Annibale (1560 - 1609) Perseus cutting off the Head of Medusa

How did Perseus slayed Medusa? Medusa turned to stone all that would cross her glance. Numerous sculptures and paintings show Perseus with the horrific head of Medusa held high, as a trophy — and a weapon. But how did he do it? How could he cut her head without looking at her? His situation is quite similar to ours, trying to diagnose and treat sociopathy: we may talk endlessly about it, analyze exhaustively the clockworks of those who function in society because they use, petrify, reify, others, but won't they 'turn to stone' all our efforts, if the very basis, empathy and the will to be treated, is absent? The solution that Perseus found was to use his shield in an original way: as a mirror. Thus Medusa was easily slayed by the hero. Similarly, hard science, medical imagery makes visible, like a mirror, without resorting to value judgements, the horror in the brains of the socially functional sociopaths.

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