“You’re on my mind” is a loose figure of speech, until you play charades with your lover in a brain scanner. Then you understand that she is not only on your mind but in your brain, deep. And we know where. We can see you lighting up right in your private parts, right there in your putative mirror neuron system and your ventral medial prefrontal cortex. That’s empathy in action.
In the 1970’s when I was in college and medical school, the only people who spoke or wrote comfortably about empathy were literary critics and psychotherapists. Now, in Western popular culture, “empathy” has earned common clout—and it’s cool enough to have served as the name for at least three rock bands in the past twenty years. We now have an easy word and apparent permission to talk about an aspect of human nature that is so common and complex that we have no idea how we do it. And we can now study empathy in our brains as well as our words.
Empathy is the capacity to imagine the feelings and the condition of another person. We’re so wired for empathy that we seem to come by it effortlessly—that is, most of us, most of the time. As infants we imitate the sounds, gestures and facial expressions of those closest to us. Imitation, so fundamental to learning, is the beginning of empathy. Our drive to attach ourselves to those who help us survive pulls us early into the task of guessing what’s going on in their minds. And guessing wrong is one of the universal frustrations: infants baffled by parents, parents baffled inscrutable teenagers, Mars baffled by Venus, software engineers who can’t imagine how I think!
A window into the mystery of empathy opened in the late 1990’s with the discovery in Italy by Giacomo Rizzolatti and colleagues of mirror neurons . While studying the motor neurons in the brains of monkeys, they noticed that a subset of motor neurons for a monkey’s hand would fire when the monkey watched another monkey reach for a banana and raise it to its mouth. The observing monkey’s hand did not move, but some of the motor neurons for hand movement fired as the monkey watched the other monkey’s hand move. The 10-20% of cells that fired both when the animal acted and when the animal observed the action in another were dubbed mirror neurons, part of the putative mirror neuron system.
The field of mirror neuron research blossomed with promises for understanding learning, language, empathy, how we make attachments, and how we fail to—perhaps a whole theory of mind. But science races inch by deliberate inch, and until a few years ago, the study of mirror neurons in people had not moved beyond studying the firing of a few motor neurons while observing a single action in another person. What we really want to study is how we understand what’s going on in the mind of another person over time. Charades offers a test for a piece of this process.
Charades requires one person to communicate selected phrases to others by mime or gestures alone—no spoken words—against the ticking clock. The game is designed to frustrate and reward the competing observers’ best efforts to guess what’s on the mind of the gesturer. Marleen Schippers and her colleagues at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands used fMRI brain imaging to track the activity of several regions in the brains of two people playing charades. In 2010 they published a report showing that activity in the regions of the guesser’s brain involved with mirroring gestures (the putative mirror neuron system) “echoed” the motor neuron activity of the gesturer. At the same time the area of the guesser’s brain that reflects on other peoples’ thoughts and beliefs (the ventral medial prefrontal cortex) also “echoed” the guesser’s brain activity, tightly synched in time. Schippers called this process “resonance.”
We’re all mind readers. We read minds in part by transforming the observed actions of others into our own motor vocabularies and then guessing their thoughts. Guessing right leads to contact, elation, empathy, and power. Guessing wrong in charades is sometimes funny, but in life is not much fun. We’re wired to resonate.