by Cris Beam
AFTER THE PARMA GROUP documented the mirror neurons’ existence, neuroscientists all over the world began looking for them in humans, using technologies like functional magnetic resonance imaging and transcranial magnetic stimulation and a host of other systems that capture the brain’s activity in general regions, rather than isolated points. Rizzolatti kept going with his monkeys, and these multiple groups started seeing the exact same thing: humans, like the macaques, possess mirror neurons in the motor cortex. When we observe someone else grasping that apple, a subset of our motor neurons will fire as though we were grasping it too. Humans, like monkeys, don’t just process another’s actions visually; we “act it out” in the brain, without moving a muscle.
And then, apparently, we extrapolate. TED Talks are good places for this. In a 2009 presentation cinematically titled “Neurons That Shaped Civilization,” V. S. Ramachandran, the popular neuroscientist, launched mirror neurons into the limelight. He said he liked to call mirror neurons “empathy neurons.” Ramachandran described research that had emerged since the Parma discovery, claiming that mirror neurons definitely existed in humans, particularly in the sensory processing regions. In reality, because we can’t pry open human skulls and pop in electrodes, only songbirds had been added to the certifiable mirror neuron list—and only in the motor region. But fMRI studies in the Netherlands indicated that certain parts of the brain lit up when a person watched someone else being touched—and many scientists, including Ramachandran, made the leap. “We have mirror neurons for touch,” he said, and he personified them. “It’s as though the motor neurons are adopting the other person’s point of view.”
Ramachandran has since been taken to task for many of his claims—including his supposition that a sudden emergence of a sophisticated mirror neuron system some fifty thousand years ago spawned the great leap forward, when Homo sapiens began using tools and making art. But still, as TED Talks critics have often observed, complicated science was burned down to a bright ember and people left with the smoke it emitted. Ramachandran claimed mirror neurons make us “empathize” with another person being touched, but touch and pain receptors in our skin form a “feedback loop” into our own brains, letting us know it is not our own skin feeling the squeeze. Ramachandran said simple anesthesia would allow you to feel the vision of another person being pinched or squeezed as your own pain. “Remove the skin and you experience that person’s touch in your mind. You’ve removed the barrier between you and other human beings,” he said. And herein lies the smoke. “There is no real distinction between your consciousness and somebody else’s consciousness. This is not just some mumbo-jumbo philosophy. This emerges from our basic understanding of neuroscience.”
Back when Rizzolatti made his discovery, he was surprised by the range of people in the range of disciplines that showed an interest in his mirror neurons: they were, after all, in a discrete brain region in one particular animal. The psychologists, especially, he said, found it “a bit hard to accept that it was in the motor system because they always considered the motor system something rather dull and stupid.”
This turned out not to matter. In 2000, Ramachandran predicted that mirror neurons would do for psychology what DNA had done for biology. Neuroscientists brought the idea of mirror neurons right to psychology’s front door.
Despite the fact that we haven’t seen them in humans, not in the same way we’ve seen them in monkeys, mirror neurons have been linked to (among other things) mass hysteria, contagious yawning, obesity, stuttering, business leadership, and the misattribution of anger in music. The backlash against such spurious connections of late has been bright and fierce.
Maybe it’s too easy for me to say, as a non-scientist looking in through a window at wires and monkeys and imaging machines, that in the rush to denounce shaky science, we might be missing a key point: the spillage. When a discovery is so promising in its potential, or so poetic in its resonance with lived experience, then it spills out of its laboratory confines. Scientists and non-scientists both use the core concept as a generative spark for more experiments: it becomes an idea available to anyone, anywhere, to germinate and grow.
PRIMATE LABS ARE NOT the most empathic places, at least from the monkeys’ perspective. The scientists in Parma complied with the European law on the humane care and use of lab animals, which meant that they could anesthetize two macaques, remove part of the bone from the skull, and cement a small chamber to the hole, through which they would later insert their micro-electrodes. They also cemented a device to the bone that would hold the monkey’s head completely still while she sat in her primate chair for her experiments.
As the brain itself has no pain receptors, the two monkeys couldn’t feel the tungsten electrodes, which look like long, thin needles, passing through their dura and into their cortex. Rizzolatti’s team was looking to isolate individual neurons in the premotor region called the F5. Rizzolatti had already spent a lot of time in this area, with other monkeys. He helped establish a map of its complex visual, motor, and tactile fields. When the Parma team began their experiments on the two macaques, they knew the neurons in the F5 region correlated to hand and mouth movements, and that the hand-related neurons discharged selectively—during goal-related motions like grasping or manipulating. And they knew that certain neurons were coded for specific kinds of hand prehension like a precision grip, and that others only fired in the presence of a 3-D object or if there was a match between that object’s size and the type of grasp it required. In other words, this was a region that transformed visual information about an object into the potential for picking it up.
Macaque brains are only about a quarter of the size of the average human’s, and they have a much smaller neocortex. That’s the most recently evolved region, and in people it controls higher functions like language, reasoning, and conscious thought. Macaques present some social parallels to humans—notably, the mothers bond with their infants—but they’re also different. For example, they organize themselves along matrilineal lines wherein the youngest daughter outranks her older sisters. Biologically, they’re not as close to us as the bonobo or the chimpanzee—with whom we share 99 percent of our DNA. Rizzolatti was limited to studying macaques because European ethics regulations don’t allow for experimenting on the great apes who, like humans, often walk upright, create tools and beds, communicate with language, manipulate one another with rage and sex, and can learn to use computers. In the Balearic Islands, Spain, great apes have been granted legal personhood, and there have been arguments to reclassify them in the Homo genus grouping, like us. All of this to say that there’s a philosophy behind the philosophy: certain animals are marked as closer to the top of the species tree and thus endowed with more rights to evade medical study and suffering. We have the most empathy for animals most similar to us. Still, when scientists pluck subjects from farther down the tree, do the parallels falter?
I find it ironic that, while we may not exactly abuse animals in our search for human empathy, we certainly disturb them quite a bit. Sixty years ago, researchers were outright inhumane to rhesus macaques in one ongoing study—yet it also influenced thinkers in multiple fields. This older study bears out other parallels too, particularly in the way the language about a discovery influences the outcroppings from the discovery itself.
These days, scientists know enough to hide the actual sight of monkey suffering behind the jargon of academic journals, but back in the 1950s, camera crews filmed a fledgling colony of monkeys housed in a formerly vacant building down the street from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The lab director, Harry Harlow, was proud of his results: orphaned baby monkeys who preferred simulated cloth mothers over wire monkeys that dispensed milk—and other babies, rocking in corners, wild-eyed and psychotic, after they’d been deprived of contact from birth up to twenty-four months. The psychosis, he demonstrated, was irreversible.
The images are haunting, familiar: the alien, old-man monkey faces with the human eyes,
terrorized. Harlow called his monkey isolation chamber the “pit of despair,” and the surrogate wire mothers “iron maidens.” When the isolated female monkeys were old enough to mate, he had to force them: he called this device the “rape rack.” When they delivered their babies, these mothers who had not been mothered often ignored their offspring; sometimes they attacked. Harlow claimed to be studying love.
Harlow’s work did hit the intended mark—before his time, psychologists largely believed that love began as a feeding bond and not much else. Harlow proved that a caregiver’s emotional connection and physical touch were as vital as food for survival. The stream of Harlow’s studies fed into other work being developed by child psychologists like John Bowlby. Harlow bucked contemporary Freudian beliefs about babies’ unconscious fantasies and pioneered attachment theory, which posits that babies need to securely attach to a loving, constant caregiver to thrive. These ideas helped transform orphanages from rows of cribs staffed by nurses into family settings and foster care. But the spillage went beyond family psychology and institutional care. Harlow was not only studying love; he was practicing sadism. His abuses were so outrageous that his work effectively spawned the animal rights movement of the twentieth century.
And this is where we get into language. If Harlow hadn’t coined the “pit of despair,” if “mirror neurons” were called “ventral premotor cortex action recognition signaling” upon their discovery, would the initial streams springing from this work have developed into such rivers?
Harry Harlow was born on Halloween in 1905 as Harry Israel. He changed his name in 1930, after receiving his Ph.D. in psychology from Stanford—a school that, in the 1920s, restricted Jewish enrollment and excluded Jews from fraternities and social offices. His dissertation supervisor promoted eugenics and believed that mental “dullness” came from race and poor breeding.
Harry Israel altered such breeding with a word. Harlow was Harry’s father’s middle name, a sturdy, Anglo-Saxon bet. It was also a positive echo: the most famous Harlow of that era was another doctor who worked on the brain, a star of then-burgeoning neuroscience. John Martyn Harlow was a nineteenth-century physician who treated Phineas Gage, a railroad foreman who survived the accidental blast of an iron rod, shot directly through his jaw and out through the top of his skull. Gage, remarkably, remained conscious throughout the accident and recovery, and went on to live another twelve years. While Gage continued to walk and talk and think, his disposition was drastically changed: John Harlow wrote that he went from being an affable, well-liked man to being “fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity.”
Gage’s left frontal lobe was almost entirely destroyed, and his was the first case to suggest that damage to a specific part of the brain might bring about specific personality changes. Harlow’s papers on Gage went on to become fixtures in neurology and psychology curricula, prompting further study. Some connect the later practice of psychosurgery and lobotomies directly to the links Harlow made between brain lesions and character change. The frontal lobe houses the motor cortex where the mirror neurons were found and is also the region for executive control, planning, and behavior control.
That multiple discoveries can bloom from a singular disaster is nothing new. The latter-day Harlow may have mirrored his namesake in this trajectory but he certainly didn’t think of his monkey lab as a disaster, or his macaques as anything other than “property I can publish.” He never regretted the trauma he imposed. While he studied love, he was known to say of his subjects, “I don’t have any love for them . . . How could you like monkeys?”
Still, fortune does have a way of eating its own tail. At the end of his life, Harry Harlow developed Parkinson’s, and he died, shaking, like one of his monkeys in a cage.
I FLEW OUT to meet V. S. Ramachandran, strangely enough, ready for a fight. I don’t usually approach my interviews with antagonism, but Rama (as he’s known) had just published a particularly antagonizing paper. In my field.
For the past twenty years, I’ve been reporting and writing on transgender communities; my daughter is trans, and I’ve been partnered with gender variant and trans men. While Ramachandran is known as a behavioral neurologist with a focus on optics, he and a graduate student had just written of a new “neuropsychiatric syndrome” they were calling “alternating gender incongruity.” Based on surveys they had conducted online, Ramachandran and his coauthor concluded that their bi-gender respondents had higher rates of bipolar, which they linked to unusual brain hemispheric switching. In reality, the link was unfounded, and what they called a syndrome wasn’t new at all but rather a well-documented experience. However, the publication re-pathologized a community and members of my family I’ve fought long to protect. Suddenly, Rama’s attraction to scientific “oddities” touched too close to home. I was supposed to be asking this man about the empathy movement he helped spawn, but I felt more like a mama bear, poised to strike.
At the University of California, San Diego, campus, which is grassy and sprawling, scented with eucalyptus and ocean, I made my way into one of the many concrete buildings dotted about. A graduate student showed me to a chair in the hallway next to an exit sign and some garbage cans; Rama was stuck in traffic. When he finally appeared, he wasn’t the boisterous, confident man who appeared on Charlie Rose and called mirror neurons “Gandhi neurons,” which “dissolved the barrier between me and you.” He was thin, much older, and shaking his keys in the lock. I softened.
“Come in,” he said, gesturing to me and two students he invited into our talk—one, a medical doctor working on his Ph.D., and another, a visiting scholar on his way to Cambridge, England. The men were young, and doting, and while I first suspected that Rama saw the interview as a bonus lecture for his protégés, I soon realized that he wanted backup.
“It’s a famous quote by Darwin—can you please look it up?” Rama said, waving at the scholar. Rama was dressed in a windbreaker and a silky red shirt, open at the neck, with a gold chain dangling a Hindu charm. On his head he wore a paperboy cap, slightly askew, and a full moustache dwarfed his upper lip. He reminded me of the kind of older doo-wop singer you see occasionally on the streets of New York. He talked fast, and he had the tremors, but his style was laid back—an old-school guy who knew things.
I had asked Ramachandran about his role in the mirror neuron boom, the way he’d likened their discovery to DNA, and he scoffed. “That was a throwaway remark, for someone else’s website,” he said. “It’s extraordinary—people don’t realize that I’ve not worked on mirror neurons.”
That was extraordinary, I pressed, given how much he’s had to say about them—in his last book, his TED Talk and in countless interviews, and in his published papers on mirror neurons and human development, apraxia, and autism. Most of Rama’s claims, or suppositions, or hypotheses, about mirror neurons have been controversial. And that’s what got us to the Darwin quote.
“Try looking under Wikiquote,” Rama said to the scholar, who was scrolling through his smartphone. “It’s something like, ‘False ideas are the lifeblood of science because if they’re true they open up a new area of inquiry and if they’re false everybody takes delight in destroying them.’”
The scholar didn’t find the quote, but I did, later. Darwin didn’t call false ideas the lifeblood but rather claimed “false views . . . do little harm.” Rama got the other part essentially right, and it’s clear he enjoys making trouble. “I usually say very clearly what might be wrong”—and here Rama turned to his students, providing a lesson. “I do a lot of speculation—and you can tell people that. You can tell them: this part of my work is solid, and this part of my work I’m only half sure. But it’s a fruitful new approach.”
Ramachandran had secured his credibility early in his career with a mirror treatment for phantom limbs and a range of imaginative experiments in behavioral neurology; he’s earned honorary doctorates and multiple fellowships and awards. He told his students they needed to establish th
is kind of sure footing before they could risk such jumps in logic publicly. So, the idea that mirror neurons were responsible for humanity’s great leap forward some fifty thousand years ago? “That was totally a jump,” he said. He turned back to his students. “If you’re going to say something like that, you’d better have your credentials, otherwise people won’t listen to you.”
The inverse was also true, I thought: if you’re famous enough for people to pay attention to you, you’d better be saying something useful—or, at least, not dangerous. The transsexuality suppositions, with their links to bipolar, were downright dangerous—to my mind anyway. I explained my resistance to his scientific methodology: how could he purport to have identified both a new “syndrome” and its potential cause, operating solely from interviews conducted online? I asserted that the trans population overall has been misunderstood and misdiagnosed by the psychiatric community for decades, so relying on self-reports online was in no way an accurate measure of any correlations.
“I guess I should read my students’ papers more carefully,” Rama said, explaining that his coauthor gathered and produced the results. He liked to give his students free rein to be creative. But then when he saw, during our interview, that the piece had been published in Medical Hypotheses, a journal known for far-flung and sometimes offensive theories in the spirit of sparking new research, he recanted: everybody knew, he said, that this was pure speculation. “It’s a fishing expedition we’re doing—our theories are in the domain of philosophy.”
Except when Ramachandran speculates, the media listens. And thus conjecture becomes conclusion. Discover picked the story up; so did Scientific American and HuffPo and the Daily Mail, which opened with the line, “Scientists claim to have discovered a new gender of human which is neither male nor female.”
