by Zeev Nitsan
Among those who suffer from autism, there is great difficulty with regard to the Sally–Anne test. According to reports, 80 percent of the autists fail the test even at an older age.
Most four-year-olds who do not suffer from neurological disorders do not fail in the test—they have internalized the notion that other people might have false beliefs. In a sense, we might say that the age of four is the age in which we lose our innocence.
Density of Synapses (Connection Junctions Between Neurons) in the Brian At Different Ages
From left to right: a newborn’s brain, one month old, nine months old, two years old, an adult brain
The Sally–Anne test shows that, until about the age of four, a child’s brain assumes, in an axiomatic manner, that its reality perception is the only one that exists. An important stage in cognitive maturation is the transition from this stage to the stage of understanding that reality has many faces and that there is room for interpretation, which is different from our personal-subjective interpretation. This stage constitutes a milestone in our cognitive development. During adulthood, however, the built-in logical failure reflected in infants’ behavior still exists as an initial, raw layer of our perception. Studies show that even as adults, our perception first assumes, for a brief moment, that our raw-subjective perception of reality truly represents the qualities of the observed phenomenon (i.e., that the subjective perception is identical to the objective essence). This stage, however, is usually followed (as a later stage of the chrono-architecture of the process) by a correction stage, which enforces its logic and provides interpretation that takes other points of view into consideration and examines the information in a broader context.
Childhood Memories
The Width of Memory Street—My Childhood Home
A description that might trigger a sense of familiarity in numerous brains is a description of a person who returns to the street on which he lived as a child. During the nostalgic visit, he feels as though the street is much narrower and shorter than he remembers. He is amazed to realize that the roof of the building in which he used to live, and which he remembers as reaching the clouds, is actually much, much closer to the ground. Perhaps the street itself did not shrivel, but it is his consciousness that shrank, and the height of the building’s roof probably did not become shorter—it is his consciousness that lowered its stature.
Some researchers claim that half the children in kindergarten might have photographic memory, which enables them to preserve an accurate visual picture of a complex pattern in their brain. This natural talent fades away as years go by, and such a talent is hard to find after adolescence.
Two Constitutive Processes of Brain Maturation
Two main processes that take place during the development of a young brain are synaptogenesis—the constant creation and dismantling of synapses (with a high tide of creation up to the age of two or three, followed by a period of “supervised pruning”)—and the process of coating the axons in myelin (myelination), which takes place until the twenties and, in a more subtle manner, even beyond the twenties. These constitutive processes determine the outline of our brain, since it meets the world until it becomes a “mature citizen” in it.
The Maturity Touch of Myelin
Brain maturation, the process during which brain structures mature to a point at which they are capable of implementing their potential, is based, as a main component, on the myelination process. During this process, the exposed axons are coated in myelin, which is oily in essence. The coating of myelin allows an effective transmission of the bioelectrical action potentials and reduces the depreciation of the intensity of the signal along the axon. Its role is similar, in many senses, to the role of the coating of an insulating material around conductive electrical wires. The axons sometimes seem like tendrils of trees in a thick tropical forest. They beat according to changing melodic rhythms of the pattern of bioelectrical action potentials that go through them.
The axons, which are coated in myelin, are grouped in common clusters, and they are the creators of the areas of the brain core known as the “white matter,” so called due to their pale appearance, as revealed in brain surgery.
The assessment of glucose consumption, the source of brain energy, serves as indirect testimony to the windows of acceleration and slowing down in brain development pace. The increase in glucose consumption is observed until the age of four, stabilizes around the age of ten, and decreases to the level of an adult brain from the ages of sixteen to eighteen.
It was found that the white material in the brain increases in volume in an almost linear, age-dependent pattern between the approximate ages of four and twenty. On the other hand, the gray matter increases in volume in a non-liner pattern, and an increase in volume is observed prior to adolescence, whereas reduction in its volume is observed after adolescence. This pattern also has unique regional characteristics, so that the pace of acceleration and slowing down is not uniform across the brain.
An Ethos of Maturation
The process of myelin coating takes place according to different rhythms at different brain areas. The last area in which myelin coating (myelination) takes place is the area of the frontal lobe and, particularly, its front part—the prefrontal area. This area matures structurally at the end of the second decade of life and even later. Due to this process, the volume of the frontal lobe increases gradually. The frontal lobe areas are the birthplace in which “managerial soul functions” are formed, such as judgment, long-term planning, abstract conceptualization ability, emotional regulation, and creation of inhibitions. It seems that partial maturation of the frontal lobes areas during adolescence, along a more complete maturation of other brain areas that are in charge of producing raw emotions and urges (such as the amygdala and structure of the limbic system), is at the basis of the high-amplitude emotional storms that characterize adolescence. During adolescence, in fact, there is structural imbalance between emotion-production areas whose structures have matured (undergone full myelination) and operate vigorously and the areas that are in charge of moderating and refining emotions (i.e., the prefrontal lobes), which have yet to undergo structural and functional maturation (they haven’t completed the myelination process yet). Upon structural maturation, when functioning is at its best, the frontal lobes serve as a dam against the huge emotional waves, and their ability to refine and moderate the magnitude of raw urges betters behavioral products.
The prefrontal cortex matures a year or two sooner among female adolescents, compared to that of male adolescents. This finding suggests that, on average, the brain of female adolescents is wired to more reasonable behaviors earlier than the male adolescent brain.
On the other hand, the rising level of testosterone in male adolescents’ brains also puts the partially built dam, positioned by the prefrontal lobe against the raging waves of emotional urges produced by the amygdala, at an inferior position.
Generally speaking, we can say that control of urges is structurally inferior among boys compared to girls during adolescence.
The waxing wave of testosterone dims the glow of social connections and leads the way to activities of a competitive, sexual nature.
With regard to the brain of the two genders, we can say that the linkage between maturation of functional potential in key areas of the brain, especially at the frontal lobes, close to the end of the second decade of life and defining this age as the age of “mature wisdom”—the age in which a person is considered qualified for social functions such as driving, and participating in elections—is not coincidental.
Memories’ Period of Glory
The second and third decades of life constitute the period from which we preserve most of our memories. Memories from other periods are less preserved.
Chapter 16: Aspects of Mature Brain Functions
Maturation of the Social Brain
The Mirror Neurons
“Mirror, mirror in my skull, how does the person in front of me feel?�
�� The magic mirror that can answer this question is composed of the unique neural networking of a cluster of cells called “mirror neurons.” These are neurons whose activity reflects the sense of the other within us. Mirror neurons make emotions become “infectious,” and their function serves our empathy skills. They create a sort of a “phantom sense” of other people’s feelings and constitute a neural infrastructure for the ability to feel the feelings of the other and understand the motives of the other. This ability sometimes makes vague social situations look clearer and allows us to extract meaning from interpersonal situations that seem enigmatic.
An average female brain contains more mirror neurons compared to an average male brain, and some may add, “as expected.”
A central ability that is enabled through mirror cells is imitation of skills, including cognitive skills.[50]
The act of imitating is a central layer with respect to acquiring world knowledge, particularly among children. Due to the mirror neurons, we are not required to conceptualize the emotions of the other in an indirect manner, since they allow us to sense them directly. They make our consciousness penetrable to emotional impact at any given time and turn the skull barrier into a membrane penetrable to the osmosis of emotions.
Aspects in Reading the Soul of the Other
The brain should not be viewed as a closed ecological system. It seems more appropriate to study it in a contextual pattern. Context carries us beyond the boundaries of the body of the person who owns the brain.
A human being, being a social creature, is defined, at least partially, according to the relationships he has (i.e., in terms of his connection with other people).
A human brain creates a representation of the person it is part of and contains the representation of the status of its owner in the social map (i.e., with respect to other people). Our brain creates models of other people’s souls, as it creates models of the physical world. That is why we are embedded in the mental world of other people, no less than we are embedded in the physical world.
A person who is important to us often serves us as a guide for self-definition.
Life in groups led to the development of skills related to “the other’s sense” of our brain. According to a common supposition, the reference group that constitutes the social shell significant to a person includes 150 men and women. These are the stars in the skies of our social universe, in the light of which we find our way. According to evolutionary psychology, this number is similar to the number of members of an average tribe that used to be the social universe of our ancestors.
Due to perception limitations built-in within our brain, we are only able to experience our own consciousness directly. With regard to others, we are forced to infer the qualities of their consciousness from external observations—i.e., indirectly. Thus the thought that is probably familiar to many of us: we will never be able to know whether other souls truly exist. In philosophy, this problem is referred to as “the problem of the other souls.” Each of us knows for sure only the fact that he or she has a soul. As for the others—we rely on inferences and our ability to “read the other’s soul.”
The illusion of particularity is a universal experience experienced by our brain. Its extreme expression is solipsism (which means “self alone” in Latin), which is a view that acknowledges the existence of the “self,” which is experienced in consciousness, and doubts the existence of other entities in the world of phenomena, which is external to us.
Altruism (behavior that prioritizes the needs of the other) is a behavior that attempts to bridge the tendency for a solipsistic gap to exist between two people. Perhaps certain types of autism are experienced by the ones who suffer from them as super-solipsism.
The 1998 film The Truman Show might be interpreted as being taken from solipsism’s school of thought. In this film, Jim Carry plays Truman, who was raised from the beginning in an artificial world in which everybody, except for him, is an actor or actress. Truman is not aware of this—as far as he is concerned, this is “the real world.” His acts in this false world are broadcast continuously on TV as a reality show in which Truman is the only authentic character. The world in which Truman lives presents to Truman a false presentation, which is supposedly as authentic as Truman is, until the painful moment of disillusionment.
Wearing the mental shoes of the other is a metaphor that relies on the understanding that, from the other’s point of view, you are the other—i.e., you are the other in the eyes of someone else, and, in fact, you are the other in the eyes of any other person.
Seeing the soul of the other can be seen as the ability to look into somebody else’s soul and to virtually walk the paths of life according to the walking pattern that is typical of this person. Mirror cells probably constitute a main biological layer of this skill.
The ability to look into the other’s soul enables us to allegedly experience “how it is to be this other person,” to feel this person’s “whisperings of the heart” in our brain and in our “heart.”
This ability results in the sense of empathy, the sense of identification with the other’s suffering and distress. It seems that this ability is quite new in evolution’s scale.
The inter-gender reading of the other’s soul is most probably the most complex interpersonal psychology that serves as an inexhaustible source of jokes. For example, Bernard Shaw claimed, as a typical man, that attempting to understand a woman’s brain is like reading the paper facing the wind. A common assumption is that a man’s brain interprets the hidden tendency of another man’s brain more easily, and, alternately, a woman’s brain understands the secrets of another woman’s brain more easily. The question is whether a woman will hit the secrets of a man’s heart more accurately than a man when both the woman and the man know the other man quite at the same level. On the face of it, it seems that the “third eye,” whose aperture is considered wider among women, will, in most cases, provide them with better resolution with regard to distinguishing between nuances.
The gradient of emotions turns the skull bone into a penetrable membrane. A person who is not a monk and secludes himself should acknowledge that his cognition is always in the midst of a voiceless dialogue with other cognitions.
Average and Uniqueness
Numerous studies have shown that the average hypothesis of an average person is that he is not average. In most cases, we tend to position ourselves above average with respect to various functional aspects. The need for differentiation and uniqueness is a powerful psychological motivation.
The sense of uniqueness is universal. Every person believes that he is different from the other and, in this spirit, the German statesman Konrad Adenauer said that, although we all live under the same sky, each of us has his own horizon.
We also tend to exaggerate with respect to assessing the uniqueness of everybody else. We tend to believe that people are different from each other more than they really are.
In order to improve the understanding of the other and, by doing so, to contribute to our understanding of ourselves, the areas of our social brain try routinely to see things rationally from the other’s point of view as “cognitive mindsight.” We accept the fact that each brain has a different array of memes, a different array of insights, and different interpretive bias, which lead to a different worldview, to the creation of different creatures of thoughts, and to different behavioral tendencies.
On the other hand, this claim does not go as far as total relativism of insights and memes. Some memes are certainly better than others. A possible criterion for assessing the “moral” quality of a certain meme is the level of its contribution to the promotion of welfare and thriving of humanity and the biosphere in general.
Me and You
Self-focused considerations and empathy-driven considerations, in various mixes, guide our behavior.
Considerations that focus on our own benefit and considerations that focus on the benefit of others are a big part of the decisions we mak
e throughout our life.
Once we become familiar to the owner of another brain, the mental representation that symbolizes us flickers on that person’s screen of consciousness. The frequency and intensity according to which we appear on the screen of consciousness of that person depend on how important we are to that other person, the nature of the emotional relations between us, the frequency of our meetings, the extent to which we are able to assist this person at a given time (“the relevance coefficient”), etc. The mental representation that represents us is etched in the brain of the other as a passive representation when we are absent from the screen of this person’s consciousness and becomes active once we flicker onto the screen of consciousness. In this sense, we “exist in this person’s brain,” and this person exists in our brain as present or absent.
Don’t Judge a Person Until You Walk in Their (Mental) Shoes
Judging the insights and behavior of another person is fairer, in most cases, when the criticizing person has experienced similar circumstances. For example, the difficulties our parents faced when they raised us will be evaluated more reliably when we experience parenthood and deal with related difficulties.
