The Self Illusion

2

The Machiavellian Baby

The development of the child’s personality could not go on at all without the constant modification of his sense of himself by suggestions from others. So he himself, at every stage, is really in part someone else, even in his own thought.

James Mark Baldwin (1902)

¹

Hitler was one – so was Mother Teresa. Every monster or messiah has been one. We were all babies once. We have all been cherub-like angels, blameless and innocent of any crimes and, in most cases, the apple of someone’s eye. But somewhere along the way, some of us lost our innocence. Some of us became evil. Some of us became good. Some of us became bankers. However we turned out, we all discovered our sense of our self along the way. How did that discovery happen?

People used to think that the infant’s mind was completely empty at birth, and then filled up with information from the world around. The eighteenth-century English philosopher, John Locke, described the mind of a newborn infant as a blank piece of paper upon which experience would write itself.² William James, the nineteenth-century American philosopher, thought the newborn’s world was a chaotic jumble of confusion.³ Both were wrong in assuming that a baby has no built-in abilities and that all experience is total chaos. Natural selection has been busy creating human brains ready for certain information. Like your laptop computer delivered through the mail, babies come with a brain operating system that has evolved to learn certain things about the world and ignore other stuff that is not of use to them. And the most important things to a human baby are other humans. Human infants are wholly dependent on others and, as mentioned, spend the longest proportion of their lives in this state of dependency compared to any other species. Why?

Approximately 250,000 years ago, a few thousand Homo sapiens migrated out of Africa aided by a brain that was sophisticated enough to adapt to new environments, but also one that had evolved the capacity for the transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next. We were born to learn. Long before writing and the Internet were invented, humans had the capacity to communicate with each other in ways that no other animal could. With communication came an explosion in technology and skills. This was not information in our genes but rather knowledge gleaned from others. Our parents, and their parents and their parent’s parents before them, had thousands of years of knowledge passed down from each generation. That’s why every newborn baby does not have to start from scratch. This is such an obvious fact about human civilization that we often forget that we are the only animals on this planet that retain skills and knowledge that we pass on to our offspring. Other animals can learn about their environments but no other animal has the human capacity for acquiring thousands of years of experience within a lifetime.

The best way to tap into that knowledge is to pay attention to others, which is why humans spend so much time as children. Other species that spend comparatively longer periods as juveniles also end up smarter than their cousins who reach adult maturity more quickly. For example, crows are a remarkably clever family of birds that are capable of solving many more complex problems that behavioural bird experts throw at them compared to other birds, such as chickens. After hatching, chickens are up and pecking for their own food much faster than crows, which rely on the parent bird to bring them food in the nest. However, as adults, chickens have very limited scavenging skills whereas crows are much more flexible in foraging for food. Crows also end up with bigger and more complex brains, which is why they are sometimes referred to as the ‘feathered apes’ because they are as clever as chimpanzees. Their extended fledging period enables them to develop intelligence. Across various animals, childhood has been compared to the research and development phase of the life cycle.⁴ Those species that spend longer in R&D end up with a larger repertoire of skills and not surprisingly, also end up the most sociable.

In humans, not only do we learn from others about the world around us, we also learn to become a self. In the process of watching others and trying to understand them, we come to discover who we are. During these formative years, the illusion of the reflected self we experience is constructed by those around us through our social interactions.

On the Face of It

Brains got bigger as a way of coping with the processing demands of increasing group size. You need big brains to think about people so that you can negotiate the best path through the social landscape. You have to be cunning and that requires the ability to anticipate what others are thinking. In order to be a successful Machiavellian primate,⁵ as another famous Italian, Don Corleone, would say, ‘You need to keep your friends close but your enemies closer still.’ In other words, you have to be vigilant for those who wish to take advantage of you.

One of the first things you need to do is identify important individuals in the group. You have to be choosey. It’s no good trying to apply the same interactions to everyone. Imagine the problems you would create if you were a sexually active male, and could not distinguish between your mother, sister and your girlfriend when it came to sexual advances. It is important from an evolutionary point of view (not to mention social cohesion) to distinguish between individuals and one of the most important ways humans identify others is to rely on the uniqueness of faces.

Faces are an unusual class of patterns because they all share the same basic structure of two eyes, a nose and a mouth. Yet despite the similarity, the average human can recognize thousands of separate faces. This facial expertise is supported by neuronal circuitry in a region known as the fusiform gyrus, a cortical region located just behind your ears.⁶ It is active when we look at faces, and if you are unfortunate enough to have this area damaged (especially on the left side), then you may suffer from a condition known as prosopagnosia, a kind of face-blindness. Prosopagnosics can no longer tell faces apart and fail to recognize those that were once very familiar.

Our love of faces begins very early. Like Lorenz’s goslings that followed the first moving thing they saw, human newborns have built-in brain circuitry for following faces.⁷ Even though their vision is bad enough to qualify them as legally blind, faces are like magnets to young babies. They can hardly take their eyes off a human face even if it is just a rudimentary pattern made up of two dots for eyes and a third for a mouth. This initial preference for face-like patterns is quickly replaced by a system that learns to recognize specific faces. By six months, if you show infants a face they have never seen before, they easily remember it much later. They are learning who’s who. But it’s not just human faces. Six-month-old infants recognize both human and monkey faces. However, by nine months, babies lose the ability to tell the difference between monkey faces much as we do as adults.⁸ It’s another example of a sensitive period with brain plasticity that becomes increasingly tuned in to experience. What is remarkable (but not if we remember that we, too, are primates) is that baby monkeys also seek out any face, either monkey or human, but become more tuned into those to which they are exposed. We know this from studies of monkeys raised without seeing faces in laboratories where the human handlers wore blank masks to cover their faces.⁹ If monkeys never see faces, they lose the ability to tell any faces apart. If they see only human faces, they get good at telling humans apart. This selective responding to faces is another example of the ‘use it or lose it’ principle, in which the neural networks are tuning into early experiences to create a permanent record.

Early face experience also shapes human brains. For example, children born with cataracts never see faces clearly as infants. When their vision is surgically corrected later in life, they still have problems with recognizing faces even though they can then see clearly.¹⁰ No matter how much training and practice you have later in life, some early exposures are important for shaping brain development. So when Tarzan returned from the jungle to take up his position as Lord Greystoke, he would have had a problem telling the difference between the cook and the scullery maid, having never seen a human face as an infant. His recognition for ape faces at the zoo, on the other hand, would have been just fine.

The same goes for telling the difference between individuals from another race. Unlike most adults who think members of other ethnic groups look very similar, babies initially have no problem. They can tell everyone apart. It is only after exposure to lots of faces from the same race that our discrimination kicks in. However, you can train babies not to become tuned into their own race if you keep exposing them to faces from other races.¹¹ So the next time you think that other races all look alike, don’t worry, it isn’t racism – it’s your lack of brain plasticity.

Smile and the World Smiles with You

Brain development requires more than just mere exposure. Having found a face as a newborn, what do you then do? As human infants are born so immature, they cannot waddle towards our mothers like birds can for at least another ten months or so. Yet it would appear that young babies are naturally inclined to get a rise out of adults by copying them – or at least responding in a way that adults think is an attempt to imitate. That’s right, if you stick your tongue out at a newborn baby, sometimes they will stick their tongue out right back at you.¹² Even baby monkeys do this.¹³ It’s not the same as bratty children in the rear window of a bus giving you the finger or pulling facial grimaces, but if you wait patiently, a newborn may try to copy your expression. The reason that this is so remarkable is that it means humans enter the world ready for social interaction.

After tongues, comes the smiling. By two months, most infants will readily and spontaneously smile at adults. This is a magical moment for any parent. Brain imaging studies reveal when mothers look at pictures of their own smiling baby in comparison to those of other babies, the circuits in the reward centres deep in their brain known as the nucleus accumbens light up.¹⁴ These are the same circuits that get turned on by flowers, chocolate, orgasms and winning the lottery. No wonder social smiling is considered intensely pleasurable.

I vividly remember my own utter surprise and joy when my eldest daughter smiled at me for the first time. It wasn’t so much a smile but a burst of laughter and giggling (she has been laughing at me ever since). Even as an expert on infant behaviour who knew that social smiling can be expected around this time, nothing could prepare me emotionally for my daughter’s first smile which thrilled me and sent me hurrying off to tell anyone who would listen. In some cultures, such as the Navajo of North America, this first social smile of a newborn is a time of celebration and the person who sees this is considered enriched and should hand out gifts to all members of the family. They say the individual has arrived in the tribe.¹⁵

With a simple pull of twelve facial muscles, our Machiavellian baby can control the adults around them with a smile. When babies smile at us, we smile back and it feels great!¹⁶ This is because smiling triggers the corresponding happy feelings in the emotional centres of our brain that are usually associated with this facial expression. Even forcing a smile by getting someone to bite down on a sideways pencil makes them happier than if they are asked to suck the pencil, which makes them pout.¹⁷ Copying each other’s expressions makes us feel differently, which is one reason why emotions can become almost contagious between people. In fact, we tend to only smile when there are others around. In one study, players in a tenpin bowling alley were found to smile only 4% of the time after a good score if they were facing away from their friends but this increased to 42% when they turned round to face them, indicating that this expression is primarily a signal to others¹⁸.

Smiling is linked to the development of the brain regions that support social behaviour, which are located towards the front of the brain in a cortical area known as the orbital cortex because it sits over the orbits of the eye sockets. Although smiling has been observed using ultrasound in unborn babies, indicating that it is a hard-wired behaviour, at around two months it operates in combination with the higher order centres of the brain that are recruited for social interaction.¹⁹ At two months, the baby is already using a smile to control others.

The built-in capacity for smiling is proven by the remarkable observation that babies who are congenitally both deaf and blind, who have never seen a human face, also start to smile around two months. However, smiling in blind babies eventually disappears if nothing is done to reinforce it. Without the right feedback smiling dies out, just like the following instinct does in goslings. But here’s a fascinating fact: blind babies will continue to smile if they are cuddled, bounced, nudged and tickled by the adult²⁰ – anything to let them know that they are not alone and that someone cares about them. This social feedback encourages the baby to continue smiling. In this way, early experience operates with our biology to establish social behaviours. In fact, you don’t need the unfortunate cases of blind babies to make the point. Babies with sight smile more at you when you look at them or, better still, smile back at them. If you hold a neutral or worse, a still, impassive face, they stop smiling and get quite distressed. By the time the baby is six months old, they will cry at angry faces and frown at those that look sad. Babies expect and prefer adults to smile at them. Who doesn’t? It’s a universal expression first recognized by Charles Darwin as one of the core components of human social interaction.²¹

Laughing Rats

Laughing and smiling are not just signals for others that we are like them, they are strong emotional drives that bind us together as a social species. They are just some of the mechanisms that begin to integrate the individual into a group. When my infant daughter burst into laughter, she was demonstrating one of the most powerful primitive needs to make contact. Without the ability to laugh and smile, we would be isolated individuals. We use laughter to lubricate awkward social interactions, as a way of signalling that we are easy-going, not aggressive and potentially someone worth investing time and effort in. In short, we use laughter to generate our reflected self because our sense of self depends on what others think of us and being funny is considered by many in our culture as an important measure of who we are. It is one of the reasons that most of us think we have a better than average sense of humour – although statistically, that cannot be true. Very few people would readily admit that they do not have a sense of humour. It’s one of the main attractive features that singles use to describe their attributes in personal ads. People who take themselves too seriously are regarded as cold and distant, whereas those who make us laugh are more likely to be considered warm and approachable.

Without the ability to laugh, it is difficult to imagine how we could ever endure life’s challenges. Even during the worst imaginable atrocities of the Nazi concentration camps, there was laughter. Viktor Frankl, a psychiatrist who survived the Holocaust, wrote how laughter was the one thing that helped many survive.²² In his memoir, Terry Anderson, who was held hostage in Lebanon for 2,455 days during the 1980s wrote about how his fellow prisoners coped by using humour.²³ One captive told shaggy-dog stories. Another mimicked the guards. The laughter made the unbearable situation bearable. Maybe this is why in the wake of every shocking world event where lives are lost, someone comes up with the inevitable ‘sick’ joke. It’s as if we need laughter as a release mechanism for pent-up anxiety. Freud coined the term ‘gallows humour’ and described how it operated as a defence mechanism when confronted with the prospect of death. In such times, laughter can afflict us like a sneeze that cannot be suppressed. I know this because as a teenager at my own father’s funeral, I was overcome with a fit of giggles that I could not stop – something that I felt guilty about for years until I realized that this was a common reaction to stress.

Psychologist Robert Provine, who has studied the science of laughter,²⁴ reminds us that the mechanisms that generate laughter are largely unconscious and that we do not choose to laugh in the way that we choose to utter a sentence. It is more of a reaction that is triggered by others around us. When others in our group laugh then we laugh, too. Laughter is an emotional state – a feeling that arises from systems that work unconsciously deep in the brain that produce the arousal. But what we find funny depends on how these emotions are triggered, which is the output of the cortical systems that process content. Laughter can be triggered by a joke or it can be caused by something less intellectual and more bodily, such as tickling. Even as an infant, we can share laughter with others and this appears to be one of the primary social mechanisms with which we are equipped. When you tickle your baby and they laugh, they are displaying an ancient evolutionary mechanism – one that is shared by other animals.

Animal laughter has been a controversial claim. Until fairly recently, laughter was considered uniquely human. However, most human behaviours have evolved and so we should not be too surprised to find primitive versions in other species. As many pet owners already know, their animals display behaviour that looks like they are having fun during rough and tumble play. Puppies and kittens seem to engage in behaviour that has no obvious rewards other than the joy of play. Initially it was argued that these behaviours were precursors to adult aggression – a means of developing survival skills for hunting. Even the interpretation of animal behaviour was misguided. For example, chimpanzees who bare their teeth in a smile are generally regarded as displaying a threat or fear response.

However, animal laughter during play had to be rethought when Jaak Panksepp made an amazing discovery with rats.²⁵ First, he noticed that rats that had been deafened for experiments on hearing did not engage in as much rough-and-tumble play as normal rats. There was something missing in these deaf rats. It turns out that it was the squeals of delight. When Panksepp placed a sensitive microphone in the cage that makes high-frequency sound audible to human hearing, they discovered a cacophony of 50 kHz chirping during the play sessions – the rat equivalent of laughing. He soon discovered that rats were also ticklish and would chase the experimenter’s hand until they were tickled. Apparently, rats are most ticklish at the nape of the neck. They would play chase with the hand and all the other familiar baby tickling games like ‘coochie-coo’. Baby pup rats laughed the most, and as the play activity declined with age so did the laughing.

What is it about tickling that is so enjoyable? There is a tactile element to it, but that is not enough to explain the behaviour because it is well known that you cannot tickle your self.²⁶ There is something about being tickled by someone else that is necessary to induce the experience. It turns out that it is the absence of self-control that creates the pleasure of tickling. Whenever we touch ourselves, our brains keep track of our movements. We need this self-monitoring in order to guide our movements but also to know whether changes in sensations are due to our own actions or changes in the external world. We are not aroused when tickling ourselves because the action is totally under our own control and predictable. However, researchers at the Institute of Neurology in London found that you could tickle your self with a tickling machine when there was a delay inserted between the action of operating the lever and the probe that did the tickling.²⁷ When the self no longer seems in control, we surrender to the illusion of an external agent. This also explains why schizophrenic patients can tickle themselves because their self-monitoring is believed to be disrupted and they attribute sensations and experiences generated by their own brains and bodies as coming from somewhere else.²⁸ No doubt losing this sense of self during tactile stimulation extends beyond tickling into other areas of sensual pleasure, which is one reason why getting a massage can be so enjoyable!

Laughter has been considered one of the primitive universal emotions recognized in every culture. Of all the different emotional expressions, laughter is one of the few that adults who have been deaf and blind from birth can generate, indicating that it predates other emotions in our evolution. If it is so old and shared with other species, this suggests that it may have a really important function. Although we all have moments of solitary mirth, private jokes that make us smile, laughter is predominantly a social phenomenon that has its roots both early in human development and also early in the development of our species.

We like to laugh and make others laugh. Not only does laughter have a multitude of benefits in terms of coping with stress and illness, but it works to bind individuals together in social coalitions. It is a deep emotional response activated by the emotional regions of the amygdala and associated brain networks, but it operates in conjunction with higher order processes related to social cognition – thinking about others. We use laughter to signal our willingness to be members of the group and we also laugh at others to ostracize them. In this way, laughter is a powerful weapon of group coalition and identity. However, sometimes this weapon can go off on its own. We know this because various disorders that disrupt the connectivity of the different brain regions associated with laughter can lead to impulsive and socially inappropriate outbursts.²⁹ Multiple sclerosis, strokes, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and other forms of brain lesions can damage the communications between different parts of the brain that control social behaviour. Even in healthy adults, the stress of highly emotional situations such as funerals can cause us momentarily to lose the capacity to suppress our giggling. It’s also one of the reasons that alcohol and comedy go hand in hand. When you drink you are partially disinhibited because alcohol impairs cortical suppression. We are more at ease and less concerned about our behaviour in public. We become louder, sillier and find jokes funnier, or at least laughing at them more acceptable. Socially appropriate laughter requires not only interpreting complex social situations but also regulating impulses that may be inadvertently triggered. This is why children must learn to control laughter. We may be born to smile and laugh, but eventually our cultures take over and tell us when it is appropriate to do so. This may explain why comedians are continually pushing the boundaries of socially acceptable humour and yet deep down we are egging them on. We take delight in testing the boundaries of our own self-control.

Securely Attached to Apron Strings

Initially most babies are party animals – staying up all night and willing to be friendly with anyone. They find all adults fascinating. It may be true that in comparison to other women, young babies prefer to look at their own mother’s face, listen to her voice and prefer the taste of her breast milk as well as her smell,³⁰ but when it comes to socializing, young babies initially don’t care who the adult is so long as they interact with them in a meaningful way. Meaningful for a young baby means attentively. So long as our interactions are timed to the babies’ activity they pay attention to us.³¹ As noted, babies have been shown to copy adult facial expressions but in reality most of the copying goes in the other direction. That’s why they don’t like adults who hold impassive faces.³² On the other hand, adults who engage in an overly animated manner, too much ‘in your face’ as it were, are equally upsetting.³³ The perfect combination is one of harmony with infant–adult interactions coordinated in a synchronized ballet of behavioural exchanges.³⁴ For the baby, it is as if the first six months have all been about discovering that they are human and paying attention to other humans. Now the task switches to constructing their unique sense of self.

This is where our early relationships seem to play a critical role in shaping our self. Initially babies like everyone but that changes somewhere around the first half-year of life. Now babies become increasingly discerning. Not only do they restrict their preference to their own mother, they can become terrified of strangers. This fear will increase over the next year until they start daycare school. You can even gauge the age of an infant if they burst into tears when you approach them. This phase of social development marks the beginning of mother–infant attachment and the corresponding appearance of stranger anxiety.³⁵ Of course, most parents, especially mothers, have already formed a strong emotional bond with their infants from birth. For a start, our babies look cute because of ‘babyness’, a term coined by our bird expert, Lorenz, to describe the relative attractiveness of big eyes and big heads that is found throughout the animal kingdom.³⁶ Big-headed, doe-eyed babies are adorable to adults, which explains why we think that puppy dogs, pop star Lady Gaga, who manipulates the size of her eyes, and even cartoon characters such as Betty Boop or Bambi look cute. They all have relatively big heads and big eyes. It’s one reason why women (and some men) from cultures around the world have used makeup to emphasize the eyes for beauty. Babyness also explains why pre-pubescent girls prefer to look at pictures of adults, but when they hit puberty, they prefer to look at babies.³⁷ Nature has wired in baby love for those ready to have them.

Social bonding with babies is a chemically coordinated event that engages the reward centres of both brains – mother and child.³⁸ The potent hormonal cocktails that flood the reward centres generate the feelings that accompany our thoughts. Just as hormones regulate social bonding, they are also released in times of social stress. This is why most mothers and their offspring cannot be easily separated. If you try to take an infant rhesus monkey away from its mother, you get maternal rage, a violent reaction typified by extreme aggression, arousal and the release of cortisol.³⁹ Cortisol is the hormone that floods the body to motivate and prepare for action. It breaks down fats and proteins to generate extra energy while putting other systems on temporary hold. Combined with other hormones, such as adrenaline, our arousal system is activated to prepare us for life’s three big Fs: fighting, fleeing and fornication.

When it comes to fighting, people can rarely be more aggressive than a mother separated from her child. During a routine security check at an airport, my wife Kim was travelling with our first daughter and nanny through immigration. At one point, she handed the baby to the nanny in order to retrieve the necessary documentation. However, the nanny and baby were ushered through security to the next stage of processing and a glass barrier slid across to separate mother and baby. Realizing the situation, Kim attempted to push through the barrier, whereupon the security guard raised an arm and told her to wait. Kim, with her cortisol raging, threatened to overpower the armed guard and smash through the barrier to retrieve her newborn if the gate was not opened immediately. The male guard recognized the maternal rage and crazed look and immediately let the young mother through. This is why most animal experts caution against approaching young offspring when the mother is about.

At about six months, babies start to show the same strong emotional reactions to separation from their mothers. Now they do not want to be held by others and will scream and wail if you try to separate them from their mother. As their cortisol levels spike,⁴⁰ they unleash that piercing wailing on separation that is almost unbearable until the infant is consoled and returned to the comforting arms of the mother. This is no laughing matter. There are few things more distressing to a mother than the sound of her own infant crying. This ‘biological siren’⁴¹ ensures that even if they are not yet mobile, the Machiavellian baby can still control the movements of their mother from within the confines of the playpen. When they do actually begin to crawl and toddle, towards the end of the first year, babies will literally hold on to their mothers’ apron strings as they go about their routines. A colleague of mine, Annette Karmiloff-Smith, made a television documentary⁴² where she filmed a young toddler and his mother as the mother went about the house doing her daily chores. When speeded up, it was as if the toddler was attached to his mother by an invisible elastic band, never letting her get too far away.

John Bowlby, the British psychiatrist, was one of the first to describe this early social attachment behaviour.⁴³ He had been very influenced by Lorenz’s imprinting in birds and reasoned that attachment was a similar evolutionary mechanism that ensured that mother and infant remained in close proximity. In Bowlby’s view, children are a bit like batsmen in a game of baseball or cricket – they feel secure when they are touching the bases or while behind their creases, but become increasingly anxious and insecure as they step farther and farther away from them. The mother serves as a secure base from which to explore the world.

Bowlby predicted that children not given the opportunity to form a secure attachment as infants would end up as maladjusted adults. Much of this was based on his observations of children separated from their parents during the Second World War and relocated to institutions that did not provide the nurturing environment for attachments to form. He found that children separated early in life failed to develop normally with many exhibiting antisocial behaviour as adolescents. In France a similar picture emerged out of war-torn Europe when children were separated from their families.⁴⁴ The way children were treated during early development had influenced the way they behaved as adults. Their reflected self, which had emerged in a chaotic, uncontrollable social world, had led them to shun social cohesion and conformity as adults.

In the 1960s, one of Bowlby’s colleagues, Mary Ainsworth, invented an experiment to reveal the nature of young children’s attachment using a temporary enforced separation from the mother in a strange environment.⁴⁵ It began with the mother and her infant in a waiting room. A strange woman would come in and begin a conversation with the mother. At this point the infant was usually happy playing nearby with the toys in the room. After a couple of minutes, the mother would leave her infant in the company of the stranger as she left the room for three minutes. The stranger would try to interact with the infant until the mother returned. This sequence was then repeated. What Ainsworth discovered was that infants reacted to their mother’s separation in different ways.⁴⁶ Most would start crying when their mother left but would settle again when she returned. These infants were described as securely attached, demonstrating the appropriate strategy of raising the alarm when the mother was too far away but settling on her return. Other infants were insecurely attached which was described as ‘avoidant’ or they were inconsolable and ‘resistant’ even when she returned to try and settle them.

There are two important limitations of the attachment account of the developing self. First, emotional attachment to the mother is found across the world but it is displayed in different ways, depending on the individual child and the way they are raised.⁴⁷ Second, as any parent will know, especially those who have raised twins, children come with a whole batch of dispositions and tempers that shape how they interact with others. Some kids are just clingier than others and this temperament reflects how they respond to stress and uncertainty. Their emotional brain centres are trip-wired to overreact to uncertainty and they probably inherit that part of their personality from their parents. My former Harvard colleague, Jerry Kagan, called this natural disposition ‘inhibition’, which reflects the reactivity of the amygdala. In his research, Kagan found that around one in eight children were born inhibited and destined to respond fearfully to new situations.⁴⁸ At the other extreme, around one in ten infants are born disinhibited, which makes them more fearless and able to cope with uncertainty and new situations. The remaining babies lie somewhere in between. Kagan found that he could identify the temperament of the infant at as early as four months of age, and this would predict their personality seven years later.

The emerging social behaviour of the child must reflect the interaction between the child’s disposition and the environment. Parents instinctively adapt to the temperament of their children, but this can be shaped by cultural norms. For example, some cultures, such as in Germany, seem to encourage independence, whereas Japanese children traditionally spend more time with their mothers and do not cope with Ainsworth’s strange situation so well. This indicates that both the natural disposition of the child and the environment work together to shape the emotional and social behaviour of the child.

Remarkably, studies of infants followed up as adults reveal that the way we respond as infants to social separation stays with us to some extent as adults. Our infant attachment patterns appear to influence our emotional attachment to partners later in life.⁴⁹ Those infants who develop a normal pattern of wanting their mother, and then settling easily back in when they are reunited, are more likely to go on to form relatively stable relationships as adults. They find it relatively easy to get close to others and are comfortable being dependent on others and having others depend on them. They do not worry about being abandoned and are comfortable in intimate relationships. In contrast, those who had formed an insecure attachment to their mother are either too needy and clingy for fear of being abandoned or, if they were avoidant as infants, they typically do not want to get too close to others or allow others to get close to them.⁵⁰ Of course, if these adults go on to have children, then it is easy to see how adult attachment can influence the shape of the environment of the next generation.

Who would have thought that our first love would be the deepest, having long-term effects on how our romantic relationships work out as adults? You can just hear Freud tutting in the background, ‘I told you so.’ However, not everything is cast in stone. Relationships come and go and can change over the course of a lifetime, and some may have more impact than others. Circumstances and environments are constantly changing and unpredictable. The early attachment effects, like other individual differences, are more likely to be dispositions that interact with the multitudes of factors that shape our personality over a lifetime. These early attachment effects may reflect temperaments, cultural variations, parenting styles and all of the above but it seems unlikely they will determine how we turn out with any certainty. One thing that is certain is that whatever may be the role of early factors, it is critical that they play out in some form of social environment. We need others in order to develop, not just for nurturing and care, but to become socialized.

Babes in the Woods

In 1798, a naked boy, aged somewhere around ten years, wandered out of the forest in the province of Aveyron in France.⁵¹ The villagers had periodically spotted him but no one knew who he was. More likely or not, he was one of the many abandoned children left to die in the woods during these hard times when infanticide was commonplace during the French Revolution. But somehow ‘Victor’, as he was later called, managed to survive. When the local villagers eventually caught him, news of Victor reached Paris where his plight became a cause célèbre. In the spirit of the Revolution, the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau had argued that man was born inherently good but that society corrupted the noble savage within all of us. Victor was the first test case of this argument and so the Parisian intelligentsia was eager to meet him. As a child uncorrupted by society, Victor could be the living embodiment of Rousseau’s noble savage.

However, Victor was far from noble. He was violent, made animal noises and defecated indiscriminately. At first, it was thought that he might be deaf and mute, so he initially spent time in the National Institute for the Deaf and Dumb, but it soon became apparent that Victor’s problem was more than simply not being able to communicate. A young Parisian doctor, Jean Itard, who had been treating children at the Institute, described Victor in his memoirs as:

a disgusting, slovenly boy, affected with spasmodic, and frequently with convulsive motions, continually balancing himself like some of the animals in the menagerie, biting and scratching those who contradicted him, expressing no kind of affection for those who attended upon him; and, in short, indifferent to every body, and paying no regard to any thing.⁵²

Itard believed that with patient training, Victor could be integrated back into society. At first, progress looked promising as Victor started to understand spoken commands. He even managed to wear clothes. However, his ability to communicate did not develop further and after five years of intensive training, Itard abandoned his attempt to reintegrate Victor into society. Victor remained in the care of Itard’s housekeeper until his death in 1828.

Wild or feral children like Victor have periodically cropped up to stimulate public interest. What would a child without any parenting or experience of other humans be like? Would they ever acquire a language? It is reported that, in 1493, James IV of Scotland ordered two infants to the island of Inchkeith in the Firth of Forth to be raised by a mute woman because he wanted to know what language the children would end up speaking if they never heard another human talk. According to the diarist, Robert Lindsay of Pitscottie, who reported the incident some years later, ‘Sum sayis they spak goode Hebrew.’⁵³

Clearly feral children have been sparking the imagination of intellectuals interested in nature and nurture for centuries. It makes good fiction – remember the young boy Mowgli raised by wolves in Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book or Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes. We are interested because we want to know the natural dispositions of humans and what they learn from the environment. What is their self like in the absence of parental influence?

One problem in answering this question is that many of these cases come from poor, isolated, rural communities and so it is difficult to get sufficient background information and details. In one of the better-documented cases from the 1970s, psychologists studied ‘Genie’, a fourteen-year-old girl who had been kept in social isolation from infancy in the backroom of her psychotic grandfather’s condo in Los Angeles. Like Victor, she had limited communication and understanding, despite the concerted attempts of speech therapists and child psychologists to rehabilitate her.

The case of Genie has been used as evidence to support the critical period of social development, but without knowing the initial state of these children, it is still difficult to draw firm conclusions.⁵⁴ Maybe they were abandoned because they were already brain-damaged. In reviewing the case of Victor, child development expert Uta Frith observed that he displayed many of the characteristics of severe autism.⁵⁵ We also do not know whether and to what extent early malnourishment of feral children contributes to potential brain damage. Maybe it was not the lack of social interaction so much as the damaging consequences of not being cared for by others who provide the necessary nutrition to develop normally. However, the fall of a Romanian dictator in 1989 would reveal that both physical and psychological nurturing is essential for long-term social development.

What’s Love Got to Do With It?

The tiny faces peering out between the bars of the cribs shocked the Western world back in 1990 as the full atrocity of the Romanian orphanages came to light. Romania Marxist leader Nicolae Ceauşescu had outlawed birth control and ordered women to bear more children in an attempt to increase the country’s population. In an already poor economy, many of these children were simply dumped in institutions because their parents could not cope. Children in these orphanages were not only malnourished; they were also socially abandoned with no interaction with the so-called caregivers. On average there was only one caregiver for every thirty babies. The babies lay in their own faeces, fed from bottles strapped to their cots and were hosed down with cold water when the smell became unbearable. Some babies had been left lying on their backs for so long that their heads had flattened abnormally. Harvard psychologist Chuck Nelson, who headed up the US team that studied the Romanian orphanages, described the conditions as ‘breathtakingly awful’.⁵⁶ Colleagues that arrived to evaluate these children were instructed not to cry in front of them. Nelson said. ‘One of the eeriest things about these institutions is how quiet they are. Nobody’s crying.’ Their normal social bonds had been broken.

When the plight of the orphans came to light, the world descended on Romania to rescue these children. Families determined to give them a better start in life brought around 300 orphans to the United Kingdom. In the United States, Nelson and his colleagues studied 136 of them.⁵⁷ How would they fare? British psychiatrist Sir Michael Rutter led a team that would study 111 of these children who were less than two years of age when they first came to the UK.⁵⁸ There were no medical records for these orphans and there is always the problem of knowing if an individual child suffered from congenital disorders, but the research revealed some amazingly consistent findings.

When they arrived, the orphans were mentally retarded and physically stunted with significantly smaller heads than normal children. However, by four years of age, most of this impairment had gone. Their IQs were below the average for other four-year-olds, but within the normal range that could be expected. These children seemed to be largely rehabilitated. Some had done much better than others. Orphans who were younger than six months of age when they arrived were indistinguishable from other normal British children of the same age. They made a full recovery. Their window of opportunity had not yet closed when they arrived in the UK. The longer they had been in the orphanage after six months of age, the more impaired their recovery was despite the best efforts of their adopted families.

The orphans were followed up again at six, eleven and fifteen years of age. Again as a group they fared much better than expected, given their poor start, but not all was well. Those who had spent the longest time in the orphanage were beginning to show disturbed behaviour with problems forming relationships and hyperactivity. Just as Bowlby and others had predicted, the absence of a normal social attachment during infancy had left a legacy of poor social attachment as an adult. Rutter concluded that infants younger than six months recovered fully from social deprivation, but older infants were increasingly at risk of later problems in life. While malnutrition played some role in their impaired development, it could not be the only reason. When they looked at the weight of babies when they entered the UK, this did not predict their development. Rather it was the amount of time that they had been socially isolated that played a greater role. Their ability to fit in socially had been irrevocably ruined by their isolation as infants.

Can you survive without others? Possibly. Some people have survived years in isolation. But would you want to? And what about the need for others when we are children? The Romanian orphanage studies reveal that there is something deeply fundamental about our need for interaction with others that makes social psychological development essential for our well-being. Those orphans lucky enough to be rescued in time prove that with nurturing homes and care, we can recover from the misery of isolation. However, what is shocking is how quickly isolation can permanently impair our social development. It would appear that within a year of birth, each of us needs others in order to be happy for the rest of our lives. This suggests that the sense of self that emerges over development is one that carries the legacy of early social experiences because the processes that construct the individual during this sensitive period are disrupted. In other words, the developing human brain critically expects input from others and, if this is not available, it has lasting impact on the epigenesis of normal social behaviour.

Monkey Love

The Romanian orphans responded similarly to the rhesus monkeys in Harry Harlow’s infamous isolation studies during the 1960s.⁵⁹ Harlow had been inspired by Bowlby’s theory of why children raised in orphanages develop antisocial behaviour, but he wanted to rule out the alternative explanations that these were children from poorer backgrounds or that poor nutrition in the institutions had led to these effects. To test this, he raised infant rhesus monkeys in total social isolation for varying amounts of time (these studies would never be approved today now that we know how similar monkeys are to humans). Despite feeding them and keeping them warm, those monkeys that spent at least the first six months of life in total isolation developed abnormally. They compulsively rocked back and forth while biting themselves and found it difficult to interact with other monkeys. When they became mothers themselves, they ignored or sometimes attacked their own babies. The social deprivation they had experienced as infants had left them as socially retarded adults. If they were introduced to the rest of the monkeys before the six months was up, then they recovered more social behaviours. Monkeys that were only isolated after the first six months were not affected. Clearly monkeys and humans from birth require something more than sustenance. It isn’t food and warmth they need, it is love – without the love of others, we are lost as individuals, unable to form the social behaviours that are so necessary to becoming a normal social animal.

What is it about social isolation that is so destructive for the developing primate? There is no simple answer and one can speculate about different mechanisms. For example, babies who are born extremely prematurely can spend several weeks isolated in an incubator to provide a suitable breathing and sterile environment for their immature lungs. Not only are they born too early, but they are also very small and have a low birthweight. However, if you interact with them by stroking them and massaging them while they are still inside the incubator, this minimal contact significantly improves their physical development. They grow and put on weight much faster than premature babies left alone. The most likely explanation comes from animal studies that show that grooming and tactile contact stimulate the release of growth hormones in the brain. These growth hormones affect metabolism and the calorific uptake so that these little guys can absorb more from their food. In the United States, psychologist Tiffany Field⁶⁰ has shown that simply stroking premature babies for fifteen minutes each day for ten days leads to significantly increased body weight, an earlier discharge from hospital and an estimated saving of around $10,000 for each infant. It may all seem a little too touchy-feely, but massaging babies makes sound financial sense on top of all the health benefits.

It’s not just weight gain; brains also thrive with social interaction. As noted above, rat pups like a bit of rough-and-tumble play. In the 1940s Donald Hebb,⁶¹ looked at the effects of raising baby rats in complete isolation compared to those raised in social cages containing lots of other rats with which to interact. He found that not only were isolated rats significantly slower on problem solving, such as running around a maze, but their brains were not as well developed as the social rats, which had heavier brains and thicker cortical areas. If you remember back to the wiring illustration in Chapter 1 (Figure 5), this thicker cortex was due to increased connectivity between the neurons. So being raised in isolation is not healthy for a social animal.⁶² We now know that loneliness stunts growth and impairs the health of humans, monkeys, rabbits, pigs, rats, mice and even the humble fruit fly, ‘Drosophila’⁶³ – and the Drosophila does not even have much of a cortex let alone brain!

In addition to physical growth, for humans, one of the real problems of social isolation is not having access to those who know more about the world. Adults usually look after – and look out for – the child. Even if an infant manages to survive, not having older and wiser individuals around means uncertainty. Without the ability to understand, control, communicate, regulate, navigate or negotiate the world, an individual is helpless. And without others to help, these uncertainties create stress and anxiety, which in the long term are corrosive to our health and mental well-being.

It’s not just love and attention children need: they also require order and structure. They seek out adults who behave predictably. Paradoxically, they will even form strong attachment to parents who are abusive just so long as they are reliably abusive.⁶⁴ This is because the abuse creates anxiety in the child that, in turn, increases their need to attach. This becomes a vicious dysfunctional cycle of love and hate that sets the scene for abusive relationships later in adult life.⁶⁵ Infants need adults that respond reliably to them because they are attentive and predictable. That’s why most babies love ‘peek-a-boo’ – it’s more than just a game – it’s a way for infants to identify adults who are prepared to invest their time and effort.⁶⁶

Of course, sustenance and nutrition are vital, but infants require other people in order to discover who they are. Without others, we cannot develop the sense of self that most of us have – an integrated, coherent individual existing independently as a member of a larger social group. Who knows what kind of self, if any, would emerge in a child raised in total isolation? One can only speculate that such an inhuman situation would produce an inhuman self.

Copy Me

It is said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. By the time infants reach their first birthday, they are always looking for opportunities to imitate. Their social brains, percolating with explosions of connectivity, are on the lookout for useful information from others. By watching others, babies are making use of thousands of years of evolution that has equipped them to learn rapidly by observation – which is so much easier and better than trying to figure stuff out for themselves.

It would appear that most of us like to be imitated or at least we like people who copy our behaviours. Have you ever noticed how people in love do this? The next time you are in a park where couples hang out or maybe a popular restaurant where romantic, candlelit dinners are common, take a look at the actions of people in love. Even though you may not be able to hear the sweet nothings they exchange, you can immediately tell when two people fancy each other by the amount of imitation they share, just by looking at their body postures and non-verbal communication.

To be able to copy others is one of the most powerful skills with which humans are born.⁶⁷ From the very beginning, babies are sophisticated people-watchers, following adults around and copying their behaviours. No other animal has the same capacity for copying the way we naturally do. This ability probably existed before we evolved language, as it would have been really useful as a way to pass on knowledge about tools. No other animal makes or uses tools as conspicuously as humans, and despite the isolated reports of nut-cracking or termite-prodding with sticks by chimpanzees, these pale into insignificance compared to what babies spontaneously learn from watching others.

This is because humans have been programmed to imitate. If an infant watches an adult perform some new action on a never before seen object, a one-year-old will remember and copy the behaviour one week later.⁶⁸ The child knows what the goal of the action is even when the adult is thwarted by some problem. In one study,⁶⁹ a female adult looked and smiled at fourteen-month-old infants and then leaned forward to activate a light-switch on a box by bending over and touching it with her forehead. When presented with the light-switch box, the babies produced the same bizarre movement. However, if the woman had her arms wrapped in a blanket and did exactly the same movement with her forehead, the babies did not copy the head movement, but activated the light-switch on the box with their hands. The babies must have reasoned that, because the woman’s hands were restricted, her goal was simply to press the switch. When her hands were not bound, however, babies must have reasoned that using your head was important for activating the light-switch.

Many animals can copy but none do so for the pure joy of being sociable. Copying is not an automatic reflex. Babies do not slavishly duplicate every adult action they see.⁷⁰ If the adult does not smile and get the babies’ attention from the start, then babies don’t copy. Also, babies only copy adults who seem to know what they are doing. Initially babies will copy the actions of an adult who is wearing a blindfold. The baby does not know that the adult cannot see. However, if you give the baby the blindfold to play with, then they don’t make the mistake of copying the blindfolded adult again. Babies know that they can’t possibly be looking at anything worth paying attention to. In other words, babies will only copy adults when they are led to think that something is worth doing. Babies will even copy robots that seem to behave socially. My colleague Shoji Itakura in Kyoto has shown that if a robot initially looks at an infant, then the infant will copy the robot’s actions. If the robot does not react socially to the child, it is ignored. By simply looking at the baby, the robot is assumed to have a purposeful mind worthy of attention.⁷¹

Monkey See – Monkey Do

Have you ever wondered why you wince when you see someone else being punched? After all, it’s not you who is taking a beating, but you copy their reaction. Neuroscientists have been studying the neural basis of this social copying phenomenon following the discovery of brain cells, aptly named ‘mirror neurons’, that appear to fire in sympathy when watching other people’s actions. Mirror neurons can be found in the cortical regions of the brain towards the front and top of the head known as the supplementary motor area that is active during the planning and execution of movements.

The mirror neuron system was originally discovered by accident in the laboratories of the Italian neurophysiologist, Giacomo Rizzolatti, in the 1990s.⁷² I remember attending an early lecture given by Rizzolatti in which he explained how he and fellow researchers had implanted an electrode into the brain region of a monkey that controls movements to study the firing of neurons while the monkey reached to pick up a peanut. As predicted the neuron fired when the animal reached out to pick up the reward. But what they didn’t expect was that the same neuron also fired when the animal watched the human experimenter pick up the peanut. How could that be? This was a cell in the motor area of the monkey’s brain, not in the human’s brain. It was as if the cell was mirroring the behaviour of someone else. The monkey mirror neurons did not fire to just any movement of the human, but only to the actions that led to retrieving the peanut. The neuron seemed to know the experimenter’s goal. Whether mirror neurons are a distinct class of specialized neurons is still hotly debated,⁷³ but they do appear to resonate with other people’s actions and therefore could reveal what is on other people’s minds.

The discovery of mirror neurons spread through the academic community like wildfire. Some likened their discovery as having the same impact in neuroscience as unravelling the structure of DNA had in biology.⁷⁴ This was because mirror neurons seemed to provide a way of knowing other people’s goals and intentions. Mirror neurons operate like a direct link between minds in the same way that computers can be networked so that when I type a sentence on my laptop, it will appear on your screen. This possibility was a big leap forward for neuro-scientists working on how we establish that others have minds similar to our own.

If my mirror neurons fire when watching someone else’s actions, then because my actions are already linked to my own mind, I simply have to know what is on my mind to know what you are thinking. As we noted earlier, if you smile and I automatically smile back at you, this triggers happy thoughts in me as well as a good feeling. By mirroring your behaviour I can directly experience the emotional state that you are experiencing. When we mimic someone else’s expression with our own muscles, we can readily access the same emotion that is usually responsible for generating that expression. This may be why people who have their own facial muscles temporarily paralysed following a Botox injection to remove wrinkles are not as good at reading other people’s emotional expressions because they are unable to copy them.⁷⁵

Mirror neurons are part of the reason we enjoy watching movies and plays. When we watch others we can experience their emotions directly. When we empathize with the emotions of others, we feel their pain and joy. In a condition known as mirror-touch synaesthesia, individuals literally feel the pain of others. For example, they could not watch Raging Bull or other movies involving boxing. Brain imaging reveals that when these individuals watch other people, they have over-activation of the mirror system associated with touch.⁷⁶ Another region lights up known as the anterior insula, which is active when we are making self versus other discriminations, so these individuals find it difficult to distinguish between what is happening to them compared to what is happening to someone else.

According to synaesthesia expert, Jamie Ward, just over one in a hundred have mirror-touch synaesthesia but many more of us have a milder experience when we wince watching someone being hurt.⁷⁷ Other people’s emotional displays similarly trigger the same emotional circuits that are active during our own traumatic experiences. That’s why tearjerkers work. They plug straight into the same brain regions that are active in our heads when we feel sad. TV producers have known this for decades by using canned laughter to prompt the same response in viewers because laughter is emotionally contagious. We cannot help but smile when others do so. This effect is enhanced if the laughter is interspersed with the occasional shot of a studio audience member cracking up in hysterics.

Mirror neurons can also explain other aspects of social behaviour, including our tendency towards mimicry – that involuntary human behaviour in which we unconsciously duplicate another’s movements and actions. When people queue up, they space themselves out equally from each other and often adopt the same postures. People in rocking chairs unintentionally end up rocking in synchrony when they watch each other.⁷⁸ During conversations, people will cross and uncross their limbs, nod their heads and mimic all manner of movements in synchronization with the other person, though it is worth noting that this depends on whether they like or agree with each other in the first place. This issue is discussed in more depth in Chapter 6 because it turns out that mimicry has important consequences on how we respond to others we consider to be like us or different.

What about yawning? Have you ever had that involuntary urge to yawn after watching someone else stretch open their mouth and bellow out that wail to slumber. Around half of us will yawn if we watch someone else yawning. No one is quite sure why we do this as a species. One theory is that it is a behaviour that helps to synchronize our biological clocks. However, a more intriguing possibility is that yawning is a form of emotional contagion – like a rapidly spreading disease, we catch the urge to copy others as a way of visibly bonding together. This may explain why contagious yawning is not present in young babies but develops somewhere between three and four years of age when children sharpen their awareness of others having thoughts.⁷⁹

And what about vomiting? Just the sight of someone else being sick can induce an involuntary gag in those around them – in the movie Stand By Me, there is some truth in Gordie’s campfire story about the ‘barf’o’rama’ where the protagonist, Lardass, induces mass vomiting in a crowd attending the village pie-eating competition. It is not just sights. In one survey to find which sound that people found the most horrible, the noise of someone vomiting was considered the most disgusting.⁸⁰ Such emotional contagion would be a very useful way of learning important information from others about what’s safe to eat. After all, what we find disgusting can be shaped by what others around us think. It’s as if all of our systems, designed to pay attention to others, appear to be set up to resonate with what others are experiencing.

If we smile, cry, yawn, wince, wretch, rock, nod, synchronize and basically mimic others all the time, to what extent are these the actions of an autonomous self, independent of others? Of course, as soon as our attention is drawn to these mirroring behaviours we can resist the urge to produce them but that is not the point. Normally, it is in our nature to resonate with others, which is why these examples reveal our inherent dependence on others, and this is part of the self illusion. These findings reveal a whole host of external, extrinsic factors vying for control of us. If we resist, then we do so by exerting effort or alternative actions. Some would regard that as a self being in control – an internal agent that does not want to do what others in the group want. I would contend that we are often capable of vetoing the influence of others but that is not our natural disposition. Second, most of us can redeploy actions to achieve different outcomes but that is simply a readjustment of internal states and drives. We can do this often, but not always.

Mimicry binds us in an intimate relationship with others, but imagine what would happen if you mimicked every person you encountered. Imagine if you could not redeploy your actions and stop your self from copying others. With so many people doing different things, it would soon overwhelm you. You would lose your self because you had been replaced by the identity of others. Oliver Sacks, the neurologist, described how he once encountered a woman on the streets of New York who was compelled to copy everyone she passed in the crowd. The woman, in her sixties, was mimicking the movements and expressions of every passerby in a quick-fire succession lasting no more than a second or two. As each passerby responded to her overt display with irritation, this in turn was mimicked back to them thereby increasing the ludicrous display. Sacks followed the woman as she turned down an alleyway:

And there with the appearance of a woman violently sick, she expelled, tremendously accelerated and abbreviated, all the gestures, the postures, the expressions, the demeanours, the entire behavioural repertoires of the past forty or fifty people she had passed. She delivered one vast, pantomimic regurgitation, in which the engorged identities of the last fifty people who had possessed her were spewed out.⁸¹

The unfortunate woman had an extreme form of the condition known as Tourette’s syndrome that is characterized by involuntary movements, thoughts and behaviours. Whereas we can voluntarily copy others even though we are often unaware of what we are doing, for her, mimicking others had become a compulsion. Luckily, Tourette’s is a rare condition but it reveals how each of us has to regulate our behaviours to be socially acceptable. Normally, when we have an urge, we can voluntarily control it. We may not be aware of it but we are constantly fighting a battle with our impulses and urges that, left unchecked, could make us socially unacceptable. Most of us have had socially unacceptable thoughts about others but we can usually keep these to our selves. Imagine how difficult life would be if you acted out every thought or told everyone exactly what you were thinking.

It might make for compulsive viewing but all hell would break loose as social conventions collapsed, which is why we need to control ourselves in public. This control is achieved by mechanisms in the front part of the brain that regulate and coordinate behaviours by inhibition. These frontal regions are some of the last to reach maturity in the developing brain, which is one of the reasons why young children can be so impulsive. They have not yet learned how to control their urges.

For the Tourette’s sufferer, somewhere along their developmental path, something has gone wrong with aspects of their impulse control. Their tic symptoms are like spasms that seem to be automatically triggered. Some tics are just simple twitches but others are more complex and disruptive, such as coprolalia – the urge to shout obscenities. Many of us have felt like swearing out loud on a number of occasions, but some Touretters are unable to stop themselves from doing so. Drugs that influence the activity of inhibitory neurotransmitters can alleviate many of the tics but, so far, there is no cure for Tourette’s syndrome. Touretters have to fight a constant battle to control their tics and these battles are worst when there are other people around. As the pressure to behave normally in a social situation increases, the urge to tic can be like an itch you can never scratch – and the more you try to stop the tic, the more the urge builds up, just like a sneeze. Not surprisingly, social encounters can be extremely stressful, making the condition worse as Touretters try to control themselves in the crowd. I expect that many of us have these impulses in social situations, but why?

I think the answer is related to the problem faced by those with Tourette’s Syndrome. The presence of others triggers anxiety as we become self-conscious in public. We feel that we are being monitored and evaluated, which makes the need to appear normal more critical. This fear in turn increases levels of anxiety. As our anxiety increases, we lose control over impulses and urges.

Where does that self-consciousness come from if not from others? Babies are not initially self-conscious. After all, who can be if they have little control over bowel movements? Somewhere along the path of childhood we start to develop a sense of self-identity and pride. As we discover who we are, we come to value our self, based on what others think. Earning respect and social acceptance from others is probably one of the major preoccupations that we can have. But, you might argue, who is in control of these anti-social thoughts and actions if not the self? The answer is that others both trigger those reactions as well as suppress the need to express them. On our own, there is no need to conform, but we did not evolve to live on our own.

Early social development begins by copying others and we continue to do so throughout our lives. The self illusion ensures that we are either oblivious of the extent to which we mimic others or think that we deliberately copy others. When we act socially we think that we are calling the shots and pulling the strings but this belief in autonomy is part of the illusion. We are much more dependent on others than we appreciate. We want to be part of the group but that, in turn, means we have to control our behaviours. We cannot just do whatever we want and be accepted. We want to be valued by others but before we can fulfill that obsession with self-esteem, we have to be able to gauge what others think of us. That requires developing an awareness and appreciation of what others think – something that takes a bit of experience and know-how.