Hello again. Gaze into a mirror and what do you see? Well, I see my face of course, but in my face I see moods. I see shifts of feeling. We humans are really good at reading faces and bodies. because if I can look at you and feel what you're feeling, I can learn from you, connect to you, I can love you. Empathy is one of our finer traits and when it happens, it happens so easily. Perhaps because, and this is brand new science, this is just out of the lab. We may have some special circuitry in our brains that helps us whenever we look at each other. Ask yourself why do people get so involved, so deeply, deeply involved with such anguish, such pain, such nail biting tension over football! >> Cleveland Browns are gambling on defense. >> [APPLAUSE] >> Why are we such suckers for sports? >> [APPLAUSE] >> And it's not just sports. We can lose it completely at the movies, at video games. [NOISE] Watching a dance, is there something about humans, humans particularly, that allows us to connect so deeply when we watch other people? [NOISE] Watch them moving, watch them playing, watch their faces. Well, as it so happens, scientists have an explanation for this strange ability to connect. It's new. >> It had never been found on the cellular level before. >> A set of brain cells, found on either side of the head. Among all the billions of long, branching cells in our brain, these so-called mirror neurons have surprising power. >> What we found is the mechanism that underlines something which is absolutely fundamental to the way we see other people in the world. [MUSIC] >> And it began entirely by accident at a laboratory in the lovely old city of Parma, Italy where a group of brain researchers was working with monkeys. And they were testing a a neuron, that's a brain cell, that always fired, made this sound, [SOUND] whenever the monkey would grab for a peanut. So the lab had all these peanuts around, and whenever the monkey made its move, the neuron would fire. Scientists thought, now hear the neuron that is essential to motion. It's a motor neuron. Then, one day, the monkey was just sitting around, not moving at all, just sitting when a human scientist came into the lab. And when that scientist grasped the peanut, [SOUND] yeah, the monkey's cell fired. Now, the monkey hadn't moved. It was the human that had moved. [SOUND] Suggesting that this neuron up here couldn't tell the difference between seeing something and doing something. Seeing and doing were the same, or more intriguingly, that for this neuron, watching somebody do something is just like doing it yourself. The head of the lab Giacomo Rizzolatti thought, wow. >> The same neurons, one neuron, fired both when the monkey observes something and when the monkey's doing something. It's almost unbelievable. >> It was surprising because this cell which was involved with motor planning for the monkey turned out to be interested in the movements of other people as well. >> Some people call them monkey see, monkey do neurons. But the name that stuck is mirror neurons, because with them the brain seems to mirror the movements it sees. This accidental discovery got scientists thinking, doing more tests, and it soon became pretty clear that this is not just a monkey thing. It's a people thing too. [SOUND] We all know that humans learn by looking and copying. That's what infants do. First you look. >> [APPLAUSE] >> Then you do. >> [APPLAUSE] >> Ready, let's see your feet this way. >> And once you've watched and copied and learned a set of moves, you not only have them in your head. >> Look, you put your shoe on. >> If you see somebody else doing it, you can share the experience. >> And want to do it with me? >> They know the moves, you know the moves, so you can move with them. If you can use the years of training that you yourself have done learning to crawl then learning to walk then learning to eat. This is an incredibly rich set of knowledge that you could apply to the problem of actually seeing what's going on. [NOISE] So that's why when I head down the street carrying all these packages, not only do people watch, look how they're watching. They feel my predicament because they know what it's like to carry heavy packages. They all know about carrying, so as they watch me moving they can feel themselves moving. [MUSIC] Their neurons are mirroring the action. [MUSIC] These neurons may be the brain's way of translating what we see so we can relate to the world. >> The mirror system is the way that you tap into, the way that you harness your own abilities and project them out into the world. >> And people are really good at watching and translating what we see. Like with just 13 moving dots, that's all there are here, you'll have no trouble recognizing these pretty ordinary activities. What's more, tests have shown when a person sees a movie like this of his own movement, he'll recognize it immediately as his own. And that's why sports fans tense with action, and wince, and leap. because if you know the game. >> Flag! Flag! >> Oh no. No flag. >> No flag? >> Then your neurons are firing as if it's you playing, giving a whole new meaning to the phrase armchair quarterback. That's why it's so easy to be a sports fan. >> [APPLAUSE] >> But there is more, suggests UCLA professor Marco Iacoboni. He thinks mirror neurons tie us not just to other people's actions, but to other people's feelings. >> So, the idea was to try to figure out how the emotional system and this motor system are connected together. >> So now, we've got not only our own individual complex emotional systems, but a really sophisticated high-level way of sharing those with others. And that was almost certainly such a huge, huge advance in social, tribal types of humans, that allowed us to progress so quickly and to take on more and more complex roles in a complicated world. So let's now begin to look at these in a couple of different ways relating back to some of the things that Professor Ogilvy talked about a couple of lectures ago. So we have a whole lot of body systems that are designed to maintain our internal milieu, most of them unconscious. Lots of things going on that need to go on to keep us being healthy, functioning human beings. Now when we have physical challenges, That arouse fear or anger or some other negative emotion, that signals a threat to our physical survival, and the body automatically and quickly reorganizes its physiology to take care of business. All of a sudden now, we can't just be going on with our routine thing, whatever we might have been doing, reading a book, walking across campus, or whatever. All of a sudden now we need to react in order to protect our physical survival, and our body reacts and prepares us for flight or fight. And, we now know that we can do some of this via surrogates, that we can see what other people are doing in that situation. And this is a very valuable thing because we don't all have to be bitten by a snake, or we don't all have to fall off a cliff or whatever. We can watch somebody else do that and see the consequences and think, no, I don't think I'm going to try that. It's a little too dangerous to try that. So a whole set of systems, and importantly, communication about this though our social interactions. We can look at this now in another domain, and that is the psychological survival. So we have belief systems that have been characterized by Dennett. I think he was the one who came up with this first, and Professor Ogelby was talking about this in his lecture, that our belief systems become a rock in a stream. So they are stable. They are a part of who we are, what we think, what we do. And all the other influences of the world just tend to flow around it and leave it unharmed as it were. And that keeps the internal milieu nice and calm and happy. But, these can be challenged in the same way that physical survival can be challenged. And these challenges to beliefs arouse fear and anger and other negative emotions. And when that happens, when we see our psychological survival being challenged, we have to buttress those beliefs to restore the internal milieu. And this can happen in a variety of different ways. You can have someone tell you, everything will be all right. You will not really die. Your soul will live on. Or one, and I think this is an exact quote that kind of took me aback some years ago when a young girl about middle school age expressed some fear of something that could have lead to her death. And her mother without missing a beat said, when you die that will be the first day of your eternal life with Christ the Savior. I mean it was just all prepared and ready to go and to protect that rock and to provide comfort and restore the internal milieu So we have all of these things, and we have confirmation bias. We are continually looking for things that will support our rock and keep it firm and keep it solid. A little danger note here. This is all psychological stuff. All of our belief systems and challenged and things like that. But when these systems are challenged the exact same systems that send us running through the woods or beating the crap out of a snake with a stick, those same physical systems are activated. And, we know from our long history of interactions with other cultures, other religions, that this can really lead to some pretty dire consequences when the only thing being challenged is the psychological survival. They're not threatening our physical survival, but they're threatening that rock, that belief system in stream. And we take that very personally, and we take it physically in many cases. Antonio Damasio has investigated what he refers to as social emotions. Emotions that we have about other people, and they're a little more complicated than direct fear or anger. And a couple of the examples that he gives, one of them is compassion for somebody else. I know somebody who got a little bit careless with a radial arm saw one day and cut off all of his fingers. And that was a physical event to somebody that I knew, and I had compassion for that person for having lost a hand. Somebody else that I know few years back, friend of mine, good musician, had a stroke that left him pretty much unable to speak and unable to play and seemingly appreciate music. A psychological challenge. And I felt compassion for that. You can go to the positive side and be envious of people. You might be envious of people who have really fantastic dancing skills or a juggler or a basketball player. And you say, wow, I can't imagine being able to do that. That's just so cool to have that ability. Or, it might have some psychological thing. Someone who is just a fantastic poet, and the words and the ideas just seem to flow out into this beautiful poetry. And we have positive feelings about that. One of the interesting things about this is to look at how the brain organizes this, and it's so great that we can see these things now so much easier with all of the imaging techniques and everything. But it might seem immediately logical that the way the brain would organize this is to keep all of the plus things over here and all of the negative things over here. But that's not the way it does it. What it does is to organize it by psychological stuff and by physical stuff. So you have a mix of positive and negative for the physical. You have a mix of positive and negative for the psychological, which really I think tends to underscore what Professor Ogleby was talking about before the separation of this physical survival and the psychological survival. So the human brain has evolved in some very special ways. So we haven't talked a great deal about this, but humans have an amazingly long childhood, up to 30 years. Sorry but it's true. Up to 30 years where we are collecting our individual experiences and those experiences are not only being stored in the brain, but they are creating brain circuits and things. So that our brain is really carrying our experiential and emotional experience along with it. And as Professor Solomon pointed out in his lecture, we're pretty pathetic creatures. We're not very strong, we're not very fast. We can't see as well as some creatures or hear as well as others. But we certainly do have a lot of leverage in terms of the way our brain manages all of that, and we have an unparalleled ability to look into the future and adjust our future behavior with the emotions attached. With the emotions attached. So we not only see ourselves in the future, we see ourselves in the future having an emotional response to that. So we have the ability to plan ahead and to be better or smarter or somehow more secure and successful based on projecting ourselves into the future and using our emotions to do this. And, of course, as we've pointed out many times in this course, if we project ourselves too far into the future, we have an uh-oh experience when we see that the final thing we do is the final thing we do. I want to show you the difference that this makes to have that ability, and I want to do it by comparing predation on that poor gazelle there. Now, the lion is just a magnificent creature even though technically it's a cat. But it is just a remarkable, remarkable creature, and it has a body and a brain and ways of processing information to really make it superb at catching the scent of the gazelle. Stealthily approaching it so it doesn't get spotted. But there's probably not a lot of forethought in this, because when the lion gets hungry, it kind of turns up the volume on these visual and olfactory systems and makes it a lot more likely to spot and take an interest in that gazelle. The lion understands, seemingly, some anatomy, and just doesn't go in and start gnawing on a rib or something like that. It goes for the parts that are going to kill the gazelle. It goes for the neck and the throat, and all of this marvelously done, but it's very unlikely that this lion is having anything like the experience of a human when it's doing all of this. First of all, it doesn't plan ahead. I mean, it's all in the moment here. If the lion is not thinking, you know, tomorrow morning I'm going to go out and find myself a gazelle. Just not likely, given all that we know, that this is what happens. When I was making breakfast this morning, I was thinking about what I'm going to do for dinner tonight. I don't think the lion does that. Let's go back to some early humans and a gazelle and their emotional planning. Look, Gork, it's a gehornibeest! Yes Bork! Don't scare it! Tonight I will sharpen a long stick for a spear. Then tomorrow we will come back and you can chase him to that narrow passage by the lake and there I will drive my spear through his heart. Then we will take our bounty back to the village, build a huge fire, and have a feast. Drums will play! Wine will flow! Women will dance! We will be heroes! Bork my man, we are so going to get laid. >> [LAUGH] >> Unlike the lion, our moments almost always take us into an emotional future. Complex emotional future, and as you've seen the quote a couple of times from Gilbert, if there's a finer gift that humans have it hasn't been named. Thank you. [APPLAUSE]
