When we hear an anguished scream, it activates the same parts of our brain that experience such anguish, as well as the premotor cortex, a sign we are preparing to act. Similarly, hearing someone tell an unhappy story in doleful tones activates the listener’s motor cortex—which guides movements—as well as the amygdala and related circuits for sadness.28 This shared state then signals the motor area of the brain, where we prepare our response, for the relevant action. Our initial perception prepares us for action: to see readies us to do.29
The neural networks for perception and action share a common code in the language of the brain. This shared code allows whatever we perceive to lead almost instantly to the appropriate reaction. Seeing an emotional expression, hearing a tone of voice, or having our attention directed to a given topic instantly fires the neurons that that message indicates.
This shared code was anticipated by Charles Darwin, who back in 1872 wrote a scholarly treatise on emotions that scientists still regard highly.30 Although Darwin wrote about empathy as a survival factor, a popular misreading of his evolutionary theories emphasized “nature red in tooth and claw” (as Tennyson phrased the notion of a relentless culling of the weak), a notion favored by “social Darwinists,” who twisted evolutionary thinking to rationalize greed.
Darwin saw every emotion as a predisposition to act in a unique way: fear, to freeze or flee; anger, to fight; joy, to embrace; and so on. Brain imaging studies now show that at the neural level he was right. To feel any emotion stirs the related urge to act.
The low road makes that feeling-action link interpersonal. For instance, when we see someone expressing fear—even if only in the way they move or hold their body—our own brain activates the circuitry for fear. Along with this instantaneous contagion, the brain areas that prepare for fearful actions also activate. And so with each emotion—anger, joy, sadness, and so on. Emotional contagion, then, does more than merely spread feelings—it automatically prepares the brain for appropriate action.31
Nature’s rule of thumb holds that a biological system should use the minimal amount of energy. Here the brain achieves that efficiency by firing the same neurons while both perceiving and performing an action. That economizing repeats across brains. In the special case of someone in distress, the perception-action link makes coming to their aid the brain’s natural tendency. To feel with stirs us to act for.
To be sure, some data suggest in many situations that people tend to favor helping their loved ones over helping a stranger. Even so, emotional attunement with a stranger in distress moves us to help that person just as we would our loved ones. For instance, in one study the more saddened people were by the plight of a displaced orphan, the more likely they were to donate money or even offer the child a temporary place to live—regardless of how much social distance they felt.
The preference for helping those similar to ourselves washes away when we are face-to-face with someone in agony or dire straits. In a direct encounter with such a person the primal brain-to-brain link makes us experience their suffering as our own—and to immediately prepare to help.32 And that direct confrontation with suffering was once the rule in human affairs, in the vast period when encounters were always within feet or yards, rather than at the artificial removes of modern life.
Back to that quandary of why—if the human brain contains a system designed to attune us to someone else’s distress and prepare us to act to help—we don’t always help. The possible answers are manifold, enumerated by countless experiments in social psychology. But the simplest answer may be that modern life militates against it: we largely relate to those in need at a distance. That separation means we experience “cognitive” empathy rather than the immediacy of direct emotional contagion. Or worse, we have mere sympathy, where we feel sorry for the person but do not taste their distress in the least.33 This more removed relationship weakens the innate impulse to help.
As Preston and de Waal note, “In today’s era of e-mail, commuting, frequent moves, and bedroom communities, the scales are increasingly tipped against the automatic and accurate perception of others’ emotional state, without which empathy is impossible.” Modern-day social and virtual distances have created an anomaly in human living, though one we now take to be the norm. This separation mutes empathy, absent which altruism falters.
The argument has long been made that we humans are by nature compassionate and empathic despite the occasional streak of meanness, but torrents of bad news through history have contradicted that claim, and little sound science has backed it. But try this thought experiment. Imagine the number of opportunities people around the world today might have to commit an antisocial act, from rape or murder to simple rudeness and dishonesty. Make that number the bottom of a fraction. Now for the top value, put the number of such antisocial acts that will actually occur today.
That ratio of potential to enacted meanness holds at close to zero any day of the year. And if for the top value you put the number of benevolent acts performed in a given day, the ratio of kindness to cruelty will be always be positive. (The news, however, comes to us as though that ratio was reversed.)
Harvard’s Jerome Kagan proposes this mental exercise to make a simple point about human nature: the sum total of goodness vastly outweighs that of meanness. “Although humans inherit a biological bias that permits them to feel anger, jealousy, selfishness and envy, and to be rude, aggressive or violent,” Kagan notes, “they inherit an even stronger biological bias for kindness, compassion, cooperation, love and nurture—especially toward those in need.” This inbuilt ethical sense, he adds, “is a biological feature of our species.”34
With the discovery that our neural wiring tips toward putting empathy in the service of compassion, neuroscience hands philosophy a mechanism for explaining the ubiquity of the altruistic impulse. Instead of trying to explain away selfless acts, philosophers might contemplate the conundrum of the innumerable times that cruel acts are absent.35
5
The Neuroanatomy of a Kiss
The couple vividly remembers the moment of their first kiss, a legendary landmark in their relationship.
Friends for many years, they had met one afternoon for tea. During their conversation they both acknowledged how hard it was to find just the right partner. That conversational moment was punctuated by a pointed pause as their eyes locked and they gazed thoughtfully at each other for a second or two.
Afterward, as they were standing outside saying good-bye, they again looked into each other’s eyes. Out of the blue, each of them felt as though some mysterious force were bringing their lips together in a kiss.
Neither felt they had initiated it, but even years later they both distinctly remember having had the sensation of being propelled into that romantic act.
Those long gazes may have been a necessary neural prelude to their kiss. Neuroscience now tells us something akin to the poetic idea that the eyes are windows on the soul: the eyes offer glimpses into a person’s most private feelings. More specifically, the eyes contain nerve projections that lead directly to a key brain structure for empathy and matching emotions, the orbitofrontal (or OFC) area of the prefrontal cortex.
Locking eyes loops us. To reduce a romantic moment to an aspect of its neurology, when two people’s eyes meet, they have interlinked their orbitofrontal areas, which are especially sensitive to face-to-face cues like eye contact. These social pathways play a crucial role in recognizing another’s emotional state.
As in real estate, location means much in the topography of the brain. The OFC, positioned just behind and above the orbits of the eyes (hence the “orbito-”), occupies a strategic site: the junction of the uppermost part of the emotional centers and the lowest part of the thinking brain. If the brain were like a fist, the wrinkly cortex would be roughly where the fingers are, the subcortical centers would be in the lower palm—and the OFC just where the two meet.
The OFC connects directly, neuron to neuron, three major regions of
the brain: the cortex (or “thinking brain”), the amygdala (the trigger point for many emotional reactions), and the brain stem (the “reptilian” zones for automatic response). This tight connection suggests a rapid and powerful linkage, one that facilitates instantaneous coordination of thought, feeling, and action. This neural autobahn swirls together low-road inputs from the emotional centers, the body, and the senses, and high-road lanes that find meaning in that data, creating the intentional plans that guide our actions.1
This linkage of top-of-the-brain cortical and lower subcortical regions makes the OFC a pivotal meeting point of high and low, an epicenter for making sense of the social world around us. By putting together our inner and outer experience, the OFC performs an instant social calculus, one that tells us how we feel about the person we are with, how she feels about us, and what to do next in accord with how she responds.
Finesse, rapport, and smooth interactions depend to a great degree on this neural circuitry.2 For instance, the OFC contains neurons that are keyed to detect the emotions on someone’s face or to tease them from their tone of voice, and connect those social messages with the visceral experience: the two people sense they like each other.3
These circuits track affective significance—what something, or someone, means to us emotionally. When mothers of newborn infants viewed pictures of their own or of unfamiliar infants, fMRI readings revealed that the OFC lit up in response to the pictures of their infants but not to the others. The greater their OFC activity, the stronger their feelings of love and warmth.4
In technical terms, the OFC circuitry assigns “hedonic value” to our social world, letting us know we enjoy her, loathe them, adore him. And so it answers questions essential in the buildup to a kiss.
The OFC also assesses social aesthetics, such as how we feel about a person’s aroma, a primal signal that evokes remarkably strong liking or disliking (a biological reaction underlying the success of every parfumerie). I recall a friend once saying that for him to love a woman, he had to like the way she tasted when they kissed.
Even before such out-of-awareness perceptions have reached consciousness, before we are fully cognizant of the subterranean feelings already stirring in us, we will have already begun acting on those feelings. Thus the self-propelled quality of that kiss.
Of course, other neural circuits are involved as well. The oscillators adapt and coordinate the rate of our neural firing and motor movements as we encounter a moving object. Here, presumably, they were hard at work guiding the two mouths together at just the right velocity and trajectory so that rather than teeth gnashing in collision, there was a soft meeting of lips. Even on a first kiss.
LOW-ROAD VELOCITY
Here’s how a professor I know chose his assistant, the single person he spends most time with in his working day:
“I walked into the waiting room where she was sitting, and I immediately felt my physiology settle down. Instantly, I knew she would be easy to be with. Of course I looked at her resume and so on. But from the first moment I felt confident she was the one I should hire. And I haven’t regretted it for a minute.”
Intuiting whether we like a person we’ve just met amounts to guessing whether we will find a rapport, or at least get along, as a relationship unfolds. But of all the people we might potentially gravitate toward for friendship, business partnership, or marriage, how do we sort out those who draw us from those who leave us cold?
Much of that decision-making, it seems, goes on within moments of meeting someone for the first time. In one revealing study, students in a university course spent just three to ten minutes on the first day of class getting to know another student, a stranger. Immediately afterward they rated the likelihood of whether they and the other person would remain mere nodding acquaintances or become close friends. Nine weeks later it was found that those first impressions predicted the actual course of their relationship with remarkable accuracy.5
When we make such an instantaneous judgment, we depend to a large extent on the operation of an unusual set of neurons: brain cells shaped like a spindle, with a large bulb at one end and a long, thick extension. Spindle cells, neuroscientists now suspect, are the secret of the speed of social intuition. They put the “snap” in snap judgments.
The spindle shape holds the key: the body is about four times larger than other brain cells; from a very wide, long branch stem the dendrites and axons that act as cell-to-cell wiring. The velocity of a neuron’s transmission to other cells increases with the size of the long arms that project to other neurons. The spindle’s gargantuan dimensions ensure extremely high-velocity transmission.
Spindle cells form particularly thick connections between the OFC and the highest part of the limbic system, the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). The ACC directs our attention and coordinates our thoughts, our emotions, and the body’s response to our feelings.6 This linkage creates a neural command center of sorts. From this critical junction, the spindle cells extend to widely diverse parts of the brain.7
The particular brain chemicals those axons transmit suggest their central role in social connection. Spindle cells are rich in receptors for serotonin, dopamine, and vasopressin. These brain chemicals play key roles in bonding with others, in love, in our moods good and bad, and in pleasure.
Some neuroanatomists suspect that spindle cells are crucial to what makes our species unique. We humans have about a thousand times more of them than do our closest primate cousins, the apes, who have but a few hundred. No other mammalian brain seems to contain spindle cells.8 Some speculate that spindle cells may account for why some people (or primate species) are more socially aware or sensitive than others.9 Brain imaging studies find enhanced functioning of the ACC in people who are more interpersonally aware—who can not only assess a social situation accurately but also sense how others in the situation would perceive it.10
Spindle cells concentrate in an area of the OFC which activates during our emotional reactions to others—particularly instant empathy.11 For instance, when a mother hears her infant cry, or when we sense the suffering of a loved one, brain scans show that zone lights up. It also activates in emotionally loaded moments like when we look at a picture of someone we love, find someone attractive, or judge whether we are being treated fairly or being deceived.
The other place spindle cells can be found in abundance is an area of the ACC that plays equally key roles in social life. It guides our display and recognition of facial expressions and activates when we feel intense emotion. This area in turn has strong connections to the amygdala, the trigger point for many of these feelings, and the site where our first emotional judgments begin.12
These breakneck neurons seem to account for some of the high speed of the low road. For instance, even before we have a word for what we are perceiving, we already know whether we like it.13 Spindle cells might help explain how the low road can offer up a snap judgment of “like” or “dislike” milliseconds before we realize exactly what “that” is.14
Such in-an-eyeblink judgments may matter most when it comes to people. Those spindly cells interweave what amounts to our social guidance system.
WHAT HE SAW HER SEE
Shortly after her own wedding, Maggie Verver, the heroine of Henry James’s novel The Golden Bowl, visits her long-widowed father at a country estate, where other guests are staying. Among them are available ladies who seem interested in her father.
In a passing glance at her father, Maggie suddenly comprehends that he, who lived as a strict bachelor with her all the while she was growing up, was now feeling free to remarry.
And at that moment, her father realizes from the look in his daughter’s eyes that she has fully understood what he feels but has not said. Without a word being spoken, as Maggie stands there, Adam, her father, has a sense “of what he saw her see.”
In that silent dialogue, “Her face couldn’t keep it from him; she had seen, on top of everything, in her quick way, what they both were seeing.�
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The unpacking of this brief moment of mutual recognition across a room takes up several pages toward the start of the novel. And the rest of that long tale plays out the aftershock of this single moment of shared understanding, as Adam eventually does remarry.15
What Henry James captured so well was the richness of the insights into another’s mind that we can get from the merest of perceptions: in a flash, a single expression can tell us volumes. Such social judgments can come so spontaneously in part because the neural circuits that make them seem to always be “on,” ever ready to act. Even while the rest of the brain is quiescent, four neural areas remain active, like idling neural motors, poised for quick response. Tellingly, three of these four ready-to-roll areas are involved in making judgments about people.16 These idling neural zones increase their activity when we think about or see people interact.
A UCLA group led by Marco Iacoboni, a discoverer of mirror neurons, and Matthew Lieberman, a founder of social neuroscience, investigated these zones in an fMRI study.17 They concluded that the brain’s default activity—what happens automatically when nothing much else goes on—seems to be mulling over our relationships.18
The higher metabolic rate of these “person-sensitive” networks reveals the special import placed on the social world in the brain’s design. Rehashing our social lives may rate as the brain’s favorite downtime activity, something like its top-rated TV show. In fact, only when the brain turns to an impersonal task, like balancing a checkbook, do these “people” circuits quiet down.
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