Pax Americana

Gandhi Neurons

In yesterday's Paxcast I read a little from a recent article in New Scientist about how altruism is a superior survival trait in groups (rather than individuals) compared to selfishness.  Now I see this article in Salon today:

Recent research in neurobiology would explain my response as the automatic reaction of a kind of brain cells known as mirror neurons. On Nov. 4, neuroscientists announced that mirror neurons had for the first time been directly identified in humans. Previously their existence had only been inferred from primate research and the observation of human brains through fMRIs (functional magnetic resonance imaging).

Enthusiasm among scientists has been spreading as growing evidence suggests that "mirrors" may explain the roots of human empathy and altruism as well as provide insight into such disorders as autism and even schizophrenia. But that's not all. In the past few years, dozens of studies have linked mirror neurons to the emergence of language, abstract reasoning and even self-awareness or consciousness. "The self and the other are just two sides of the same coin. To understand myself, I must recognize myself in other people," says Marco Iacoboni.

Sound like Marin County, Calif., Buddhism? Maybe so. But it's also SoCal neurobiology. Iacoboni is a neuroscientist and professor of psychiatry at UCLA, where he directs the Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center. "We are hard-wired to feel what others experience as if it were happening to us," he says. Down the road in San Diego, Vilayanur Ramachandran, director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at UCSD, offers, "We used to say, metaphorically, that 'I can feel another's pain.' But now we know that my mirror neurons can literally feel your pain."

Iacoboni's "hard-wiring" is a network of ordinary-looking neurons distributed throughout the brain. Unlike other kinds of brain cells, such as motor neurons, which control muscles, mirror neurons fire both when a person is in action, and when he or she observes someone else engaged in the same action. Before the discovery of mirror neurons, cognitive scientists assumed that we gained access to the feelings of others by theorizing about them. Now we know that a direct experience is responsible for much of what we thought was computation, speculation, memory or inference. Through my mirror neurons, the young woman cries in the same part of my brain where I do.

Not all scientists believe that mirror neurons represent "a great leap forward," as Ramachandran has written. Alison Gopnik, a developmental psychologist at U.C. Berkeley's Institute of Cognitive and Brain Sciences, flatly labels mirror neurons a myth. But her voice is drowned out by an academic chorus of mirror hosannahs.

If Ramachandran, Iacoboni and hundreds of other neuroscientists now poring over mirror neurons are correct, directly sharing the experience of others is a key to who and what we are, how our brains and minds evolved, and how they develop from childhood. Compassion and empathy, feeling the experience of another, is not just something we're capable of, it is woven into the fabric we are cut from. "Mirror neurons dissolve the barrier between you and someone else," says Ramachandran. He calls them "Gandhi neurons."

Along with dozens of studies in neuroscience journals, mirror neurons have also taken a place in the folk psychology battle over how to frame human nature. Alan Greenspan and the rugged individualists may love Ayn Rand's libertarian vision of each person alone against the world, but another set prefers to think of humans as inextricably tied to one another, creating codependent realities and sharing inter-subjective space.

In fact, the problem of altruism has vexed biologists since Darwin. Why do people sacrifice their own self-interest, sometimes even their lives, in order to help others? Genes for such behavior should be selected against quickly and definitively. But if mirror neuron theorists are right, the advantages of directly understanding others may be so great that it blows the evolutionary cost of occasional self-sacrifice out of the water. What's selected for might be the ability to imitate others, and to understand and feel what they are feeling. Self-sacrifice and altruism might be mere byproducts of mirroring and not themselves adaptive in a way selected for by evolution. In any case, "we are good," says Iacoboni, "because our biology drives us to be good."
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Whether mirror neurons bring about a paradigm shift in our conception of ourselves remains to be seen. In the meantime, there seems to be near consensus that we are exquisitely tuned to one another's experience and that mirror neurons help us to experience each other viscerally and directly. While that may explain the direct emotional impact the crying woman on the train had on me, it doesn't explain why I did nothing to help her. We may be fundamentally interconnected, but we are individuals too. If the crying woman had been diagnosed with terminal cancer, I might have felt her emotional pain, but I wouldn't have grown her tumor. So perhaps, as Gopnik says, the leap that connects the co-firing of neurons to the human condition is only metaphorical after all.

But then, Ramachandran points out, a good mirror-neuron-enabled metaphor is one of the most powerful things a human can have. Or share.

Go know.

ntodd

Put The Ozone Man Under House Arrest

Climate Progress:

In February 2006, officials removed the words “understand and protect our home planet” from NASA’s mission statement. More substantively, NASA’s earth sciences budget has dropped 30% while the funding has gone up for the President’s Mission to Mars program.

Then there is the story behind the Deep Space Climate Observatory. DSCOVR, as it now is known, is a satellite sitting in a warehouse in Maryland, gathering dust rather than climate data. Its original mission was to hold a position in space that would allow it to continuously photograph the sunlit side of the planet, providing scientists with their first direct measurements of the amount of solar energy reaching the Earth and how much is reflected. In addition, DSCOVR would monitor weather systems, vegetation and other indicators of climate change.

DSCOVR has one fatal flaw, however. It was conceived by Al Gore, not as an instrument to gather climate data, but to broadcast a constant image of Earth on the internet, which Gore hoped would raise public awareness about the planet and the climate. DSCOVR originally was scheduled to launch in 2001 but Congress, controlled by Republicans at the time, dubbed the satellite “Goresat” and ordered that it be put in storage at the Goddard Space Flight Center. Despite the fact that the U.S. Academy of Sciences judged that DSCOVR would make a “strong and vital” contribution to our understanding of climate change, NASA cancelled the program in January 2006, explaining that “the context of competing priorities and the state of the budget for the foreseeable future precludes continuation of the project.”

Yet the cost to launch DSCOVR was estimated at $100 million, only one-thousandth the cost of the International Space Station and the “competing priority” apparently is the Mars program. Why Mars should enjoy a higher priority than Earth in the president’s cosmology remains one of the great mysteries of the universe.

Climate scientists lament that with the erosion of NASA’s satellites budget, the institutions trying to better understand global warming are going blind. “The observations we have at this point just aren’t good enough,” said Robert Charlson of the Department of Atmospheric Sciences and Department of Chemistry at the University of Washington in Seattle. “The biggest single problem we have now is a lack of adequate satellite measurements, and the platforms that could be moving us toward answers are either pending or being killed.”

Goresat apparently is to the Irrational Right what Galileo’s telescope was to the Church in the 17th Century — a scientific instrument that threatens the old world view. If now were then, Limbaugh would be calling for an Inquisition to silence Gore-ileo’s heresy and to cast him into a dungeon from which he would never be heard again.

Yup, perfect analogy with Galileo (though he was just put under house arrest after commutation of his sentence).

ntodd