One of the most majestic aspects of the human species is its arbitrary ability to feel; not just feel, but also be able to feel for others– empathy. A severely overlooked quality, our ability to place ourselves in other’s shoes and formulate what another person is feeling is employed constantly throughout our lives, when watching or reading pieces of literature, everyday interactions, and more. From an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense as by understanding one another’s emotions, we can foster a community that supports each individual. Through this push for a better collective, each individual benefits from helping each other, especially when understanding the struggles of another. Attributed as a subjective human trait, it seems to ostracize itself from the objective world of neurobiology.
But this all changed with the discovery of mirror neurons. First discovered in primates when watching another individual perform a task, a huge amount of neurons in the prefrontal cortex activated. Rapidly, many began experimenting with this new subset of neurons, discovering that when an individual watches a certain action occur, the same neurons for that action activate within that individual. Have you ever squirmed by watching a certain event occur- like someone receiving a vaccine or getting into a brutal accident? When this happens, the neurons of ‘receiving a vaccine’ or ‘getting into that brutal accident’ in your mind also activate even though you yourself are not experiencing it. After all, how else to understand another’s situation than to understand through your personal experience and actually attempt to replicate the scenario in your head?
Watching an individual get hugged will evoke joy for us because our mind mimics the same experience and attributes it to previous feelings of joy we’d received from hugging earlier. It is important to recognize however that while this offers a foundation for empathy, it is not all-encompassing as empathy itself is an arbitrary word to describe a feeling with no real grounding or boundaries.
Now if the same neurons are activating when watching an action, how come we don’t actually move in the same way? When our body realizes someone is not hugging us, or that we aren’t receiving a vaccine, it inhibits any motor response. If the impulses contrast with the sensory signals the body is sending, the body will win and hence no motor response is necessitated. Otherwise, every time we are learning an action, we would be mimicking it- not to deny the effectiveness of mimicking an action as it has been proven that experience is more effective than non-kinetic learning.
Critics have pointed out that these neurons do not activate when viewing pantomimed actions and rather mirror neurons are a product of associative learning. This brings to question the validity of many of the emerging studies on mirror neurons, with many responding that mirror neurons only activate in goal-directed actions. Goal-directed action is defined as a behavior driven by an expectation that it is likely to bring about a desired outcome. Our brain is exposed to heavy amounts of stimuli on a constant basis, so your brain logically would have to filter what is pertinent and what is not. Hence, our mirror neurons will not activate for every action that occurs, but rather actions it deems to be essential.
The question arises of what goes awry with mirror neurons if they do in fact exist. Since we have established that mirror neurons are responsible for understanding each other in society, a person wouldn’t be able to fully understand what is going around them if they lack these neurons. In the case of autism, researchers have found a much lower rate of mirror neurons present in the prefrontal cortex, hence leading to their inability to understand the social consequences of their actions. One could say it is freeing in of itself to not be bound by a societal construct of what is appropriate, but from the objective standing science attempts to propose, it would make sense why they are not able to understand the community they are in. Hence they are isolated and alone with their personal feelings.
Mirror neurons have gone as far as to extend to the idea of phantom limbs- the feeling that you still have an arm despite it being cut off. Those with phantom limbs have found that they can feel someone touching their phantom limb just by watching another person having their limb touched. The important item to recognize is with the loss of the limb, the autocorrecting feature of sensory reception is lost due to the nerves being there. Because of this, the mind reimagines the limb getting touched, and with no arm to tell them otherwise truly feels a stimulus where there is none.
Mirror neurons are a rapidly growing part of neurology with much of it explaining the evolutionary advantage and growth of communities through the ability to feel, but it is a highly controversial idea with critics simply asserting it is a byproduct. The beauty of science presents itself in these debates, and who knows where this journey of mirror neurons leads us next?
