Mirror Neurons – 2
This continues Mirror Neurons – 1.
Mirror Neurons and Parents
Caution: Rampant Speculation Ahead – Drive Carefully!
Do mirror neurons matter to you as a parent? Without knowing about them can you still help your child grow into a full, effective intelligence? Of course. We’ve been educating our kids fine without knowing about mirror neurons for quite a few million years. (We’ve had Dr. Spock to help us for the last millennium, but we even got along without him for a while.)
We’ve always acted as though we knew these circuits existed – that’s why we show our kids how to do things, and generally go to the trouble of teaching them. But being consciously aware of their existence and influence will help us direct our own efforts more skillfully, and dodge some strategies that come easily but work badly. I think awareness of these circuits changes the valence of many everyday experiences. I’m thinking my way into this as I write – this is brand new stuff – but it seems to me that understanding mirror neurons gives you a compass for much of child rearing.
Start from the potency these newly discovered circuits give to much behavior. Your child’s brain shares in the experiences of others: co-experiences. When she sees someone else do something, it’s not only that her brain observes, analyzes, learns how to do the same thing. Her brain does it. There must be evolutionary value to this response, which is more than a cognitive registering of the experience. These circuits developed because kids with a greater ability to imitate, model, and coexperience had a better chance of surviving and having kids who survived.
Mirror neurons are strong verification of the the philosophy I set out in Grow with the Flow. Here’s the core of the core, from my Credo:
Humans are born to be learners – it’s in our nature….
Kids learn because their brains are deeply structured to want and need to learn.Grow With the Flow, p. 57
(The illustration on that page shows mirror neurons at work. Coincidence or prescience?)
Mirror neurons are the key to the intensity of human learning. Our brains’ urgent, deep-wired drive to share with others, to coexperience, is the basis for our automatic, prepotent inclination to learn by modeling. It is that wiring which makes cultural transmission possible. ("Cultural transmission” is everything we know that we didn’t have to figure out for ourselves.) Mirror neurons are a Rosetta Stone for much of the uniqueness and complexity of human behavior.
So How Can Mirror Neurons Help Parents?
A Potpourri of Speculations and Strategy Suggestions
- Kids are responding to you – they can hardly help it, the wiring is so strong. (Yes, this even applies to 15-year-olds. It’s just a bit more difficult to see.)
- What you say matters. What you do may matter even more. As I leaf through Grow With the Flow, Part 2: Theory into Practice, I’m finding it (hindsight is 20:20) gratifyingly easy to see mirror neurons everywhere. The common sense advice I give there seems to be strengthened and justified by this new discovery, We act as though mirror neuron circuits were our friends every time we show a child how to do something, explain what we’re doing, think about who he spends time with, model how to think creatively or critically, introduce new concepts or procedures, frame and interpret what she sees or hears.
- It’s critical to understand that mirror neurons generate a full-body response to our experiences. We think about our experiences. Some part of our brain does them. But we also feel them, and we feel our way into their meaning to us. Because of mirror neurons, we coexperience. When we see someone hurt, rejected, passionate, angry, we share in their emotion. When we see a beautiful dance or a home run, our motor circuits share the movement. This automatic, visceral response is a big part of what makes us such good learners. Understanding the body-based nature of responses to others helps us think about how to talk with our child so we’ll be heard well.
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It’s important to communicate with the correct part of the brain. When we are talking with our child about an issue, and we discuss, explain, argue our case, we’re trying to play to our child’s neocortex – appealing, through language, to reason and logic. But if the experience is visceral / emotional, we’re playing to an empty theater: The audience is downstairs in the emotional centers, having an experience. We’ve often described that as emotions clouding or blocking reason. It would be more accurate to say the experience is a holistic response that involves multiple brain systems.
Take an example as simple as this: Your child has just seen someone on TV playing with a toy. He desperately wants the toy. Remember that he has just coexperienced playing with the toy. It was fun! (I plan to come back, in a third post, to this question of how advertisers and politicians may be able to manipulate us via mirror neuron circuits.)
It seems likely that the first task is to open rational channels through response to the emotional ones. Help him learn to calm and soothe himself. Respect the emotions, and the wanting. (That doesn’t mean giving in to them. It means respecting his feelings at that moment.) Recognize that he wants the toy badly right now. The time to talk is later.
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Be clear that your child isn’t the only one with mirror neuron circuits. When the two of you talk, you are dancing together. His facial expressions, her tone of voice affect you. And vice versa. So often, kids will say “You yelled at me.” Their parent says “I never yelled at you.” They’re both right: The parent’s voice never rose, but they were frustrated, and the child empathized with the micro-signals of the parent’s frustration, read the underlying tone, vibrated with it, and felt the parent yelling.
Ever find yourself, in moments of stress, falling back on exactly the strategies your parents used – the ones you promised yourself when you were 12 that you would never, ever use? I suspect mirror neurons have a lot to do with this – we’re having a coexperience with our child – our bodies responding to their signals, theirs to ours, and the whole mess spiraling downward, out of the thinking parts of our brain to the emotional parts and thence to strategies that were embedded when we were kids. We can learn to control those responses, but it isn’t automatic.
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I bet the frequent success of the Fay-Cline Love and Logic approach is because it gives everyone breathing room for the child to get back to rational thinking, and gives parents a way to stay there!
Similarly, the Greene-Ablon Collaborative Problem Solving approach, the best new tool I’ve been given in years, seems to me to provide a process which exactly models what parents will do if they recognize the importance of mirror neurons.
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Mirror neurons seem likely to contribute to some of the bumpy roads of adolescence. Start from a hypothesis: Kids are likely to look to those who are most important to them for their models. Their mirror neuron circuits seem likely to respond most readily to their core social group. In early childhood, that’s parents, older siblings, and relatives. In adolescence – well, I don’t need to finish that sentence, do I? Ah, yes, and then there are hormones, and a still-developing frontal lobe. (I hope to talk someday about Jay Giedd’s revelatory work and its importance to parents.)
I think the bumpy road of the teen years is at least partly as it needs to be. The business of adolescence is to move into the larger world as an independent entity – to finally cut the umbilical cord. But it does present us with some new challenges – ooops, new opportunities.
That’s a natural transition to a third posting on this important topic – some speculations about When Good Neurons Go Bad. (You’ve been waiting for the movie, but now you can read it here first!)
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I’m seeing the influence of mirror neuron circuits everywhere. I find myself looking back at some of the studies that most influenced me, some of the most exciting and mysterious findings of recent decades, and having that wonderful moment of “Aha! That’s what was happening! Mirror neurons!”
As we delve infinitesimally deeper into the wondrous organ we carry around so casually balanced on our neck, we keep finding deeper and deeper layers of architecture to help us get our job done – raising the next generation, and staying alive long enough to do it.
Consider a study I mentioned a while ago: Monkey See, Monkey Do. I wrote that post before I saw the link to mirror neurons, but when I reread it, there they are – how could I have missed it?. You show a chimp and a child how to open a puzzle box. Either could figure it out on their own. You throw in a couple of unnecessary extra steps. The child puts in the extra steps, the chimp just opens the box the sensible, simpler way. Why? How can that possibly show the child as more advanced? Because the child’s brain is ready to assimilate a complex culture. He may not always know why adults do it as they do it, but they’re usually pretty good guides, so his brain is wired to follow their procedure. Mirror neurons.
Oh, the places you’ll go when you fall into the blogging habit! I wanted a quotation – maybe from Shakespeare or even Plato – something classy – to cap off the first mirror neuron post. I found a marvelous site that offers quotations by keywords:
http://www.poemhunter.com/quotations/
I scanned their 130 entries that included “mirror.” As I read, it struck me that very many of the quotations there seem to me to comment on the existence and function of mirror neurons. (Who knows, perhaps the ability to experience a quotation, a poem, is itself dependent on mirror neurons.) In any case, here’s a jumble of quotations, with apologies to the web site for the quantity of material I appropriated. Browse if you wish, and consider how these reflect the essence of humanness – learning by watching, empathizing with what we see, understanding ourselves through others. Let’s start with someone who seems to have missed mirror neurons entirely, then move on to some psychologically more sophisticated folks:
The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him.
(Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), Austrian psychiatrist. repr. in Complete Works, vol. 12, eds. James Strachey and Anna Freud (1958). Recommendations to Physicians Practising Psycho-Analysis, sct. G (1912). On the ideal practice of psychoanalysis.)
Woman fears for man, he goes
out alone to his labors. No mirror
nests in his pocket.
(Denise Levertov (b. 1923), Anglo-U.S. poet. “Abel’s Bride.")
Some will not recognize the truthfulness of my mirror. Let them remember that I am not here to reflect the surface … but must penetrate inside. My mirror probes down to the heart. I write words on the forehead and around the corners of the mouth. My human faces are truer than the real ones.
(Paul Klee (1879-1940), Swiss artist. The Diaries of Paul Klee 1898-1918, no. 136, entry, Munich 1901 (1957, trans. 1965).)
Children are like a mirror. They help you see yourself and all the flaws that you and your partner might have avoided looking at earlier.
(Virginia Kelly (20th century), Philadelphia mother. As quoted in “Parenting Passages,” Child (June-July 1992).)
Commitment, by its nature, frees us from ourselves and, while it stands us in opposition to some, it joins us with others similarly committed. Commitment moves us from the mirror trap of the self absorbed with the self to the freedom of a community of shared values.
(Michael Lewis (late 20th century), professor, pediatrics and psychiatry. Shame, The Exposed Self, ch. 11 (1992).)
A curious thing about atrocity stories is that they mirror, instead of the events they purport to describe, the extent of the hatred of the people that tell them.
Still, you can’t listen unmoved to tales of misery and murder.
(John Dos Passos (1896-1970), U.S. novelist, poet, playwright, painter. Journeys Between Wars, “Introduction to Civil War 1916-1937,” Harcourt Brace and Company (1938).)
You must realize that I was suffering from love and I knew him as intimately as I knew my own image in a mirror. In other words, I knew him only in relation to myself.
(Angela Carter (1940-1992), British postmodern novelist. repr. Penguin. “Souvenir of Japan,” Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces, p. 9 (1974).)
Your toddler is no longer a baby feeling himself as part of you, using you as his controller, facilitator, his mirror for himself and the world. But he is not yet a child either; ready to see you as a person in your own right and to take responsibility for himself and his own actions in relation to you.
(Penelope Leach (20th century), British child development specialist. Your Baby and Child, ch. 5 (1977).)
The good enough mother, owing to her deep empathy with her infant, reflects in her face his feelings; this is why he sees himself in her face as if in a mirror and finds himself as he sees himself in her. The not good enough mother fails to reflect the infant’s feelings in her face because she is too preoccupied with her own concerns, such as her worries over whether she is doing right by her child, her anxiety that she might fail him.
(Bruno Bettelheim (20th century), Austrian-U.S. child psychologist. A Good Enough Parent, ch. 1 (1987).)
I don’t know that this one is relevant, but it’s certainly beautiful, so…
We have fallen in the dreams the Ever-living
Breathe on the burnished mirror of the world
And then smooth out with ivory hands and sigh,
And find their laughter sweeter to the taste
For that brief sighing.
(William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), Irish poet, playwright. “The Shadowy Waters.")
The purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now,
was and is, to hold as ’twere the mirror up to nature: to show
virtue her feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and
body of the time his form and pressure.
(William Shakespeare (1564-1616), British dramatist, poet. Hamlet, in Hamlet, act 3, sc. 2, l. 20-4.
When those who have the power to name and to socially construct reality choose not to see you or hear you … when someone with the authority of a teacher, say, describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked in the mirror and saw nothing. It takes some strength of soul—and not just individual strength, but collective understanding—to resist this void, this non-being, into which you are thrust, and to stand up, demanding to be seen and heard.
(Adrienne Rich (b. 1929), U.S. poet, essayist, and lesbian feminist. Blood, Bread and Poetry, ch. 13 (1986). From an essay written in 1984.)
Sisters are always drying their hair.
Locked into rooms, alone,
They pose at the mirror, shoulders bare,
Trying this way and that their hair,
Or fly importunate down the stair
To answer the telephone.
(Phyllis McGinley (1905-1978), U.S. poet, author. Girl’s-Eye View of Relatives: Triolet against Sisters, Times Three (1960).)
Ours has been called a culture of narcissism. The label is apt but can be misleading. It reads colloquially as selfishness and self-absorption. But these images do not capture the anxiety behind our search for mirrors. We are insecure in our understanding of ourselves, and this insecurity breeds a new preoccupation with the question of who we are. We search for ways to see ourselves. The computer is a new mirror, the first psychological machine. Beyond its nature as an analytical engine lies its second nature as an evocative object.
(Sherry Turkle (b. 1948), U.S. sociologist and psychologist. The Second Self, ch. 9 (1984). Turkle was on the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s program in Science, Technology and Society.)
One should speak of television’s cold light, and why it is inoffensive to the imagination (including the imagination of children). It is innocuous because it no longer conveys an imaginary, for the simple reason that it is no longer an image. Here it contrasts with the cinema which (though increasingly contaminated by television) is still endowed with an intense imaginary—because it is an image. This is not simply to speak of film as a mere screen or visual form, but as a myth, something that still resembles a double, a mirror, a fantasy, a dream, etc. None of this is in the TV image. It doesn’t suggest anything, it mesmerizes…. It is only a screen or, better, it is a miniaturized terminal that immediately appears in your head (you are the screen and the television is watching you), transistorizes all your neurons and passes for a magnetic tape—a tape, not an image.
(Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929), French semiologist. “The Political Destiny of Seduction,” Seduction (1979, trans. 1990).)
We must watch the infant in his mother’s arms; we must see the first images which the external world casts upon the dark mirror of his mind, the first occurrences which he witnesses; we must hear the first words which awaken the sleeping powers of thought, and stand by his earliest efforts,—if we would understand the prejudices, the habits, and the passions which will rule his life. The entire man is, so to speak, to be seen in the cradle of the child.
(Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859), French social philosopher. Democracy in America, vol. 1, ch. 2 (1835).)
Life is for each man a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors.
(Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953), U.S. dramatist. Lazarus, in Lazarus Laughed, act 2, sc. 1 (1927).)
How frail the human heart must be—
a mirrored pool of thought.
(Sylvia Plath (1932-1963), U.S. poet. Quoted in “I Thought I Could Not Be Hurt,” introduction, Letters Home: Correspondence 1950-1963, Aurelia Schober Plath (1975). This was Plath’s first poem, written at age 14.)
Shine alone, shine nakedly, shine like bronze,
that reflects neither my face nor any inner part
of my being, shine like fire, that mirrors nothing.
(Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), U.S. poet. “Nuances of a Theme by Williams.")
Ideas are so much flat psychological surface unless some mirrored matter gives them cognitive lustre.
(William James (1842-1910), U.S. philosopher, psychologist. Originally published in Philosophical Review (1908). “The Pragmatist Account of Truth and Its Misunderstanders,” The Meaning of Truth, New York (1909).)
Ooops, I got in Shakespeare, but no Plato.
Today’s Verba Volant quotation is about mirror neurons:
Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
James Baldwin