The Social Animal

CHAPTER 3 MINDSIGHT

IT IS SAD TO REPORT THAT EVEN IN HER LATE TWENTIES, JULIA kept her Spring Break personality alive and on call. Responsible and ambitious by day, she would let her inner Cosmo girl out for a romp on Saturday nights. In these moods, she still thought it was cool to be sassy. She still thought it was a sign of social bravery to be a crude-talking, hard-partying, cotton candy lipstick–wearing, thong-snapping, balls-to-the-wall disciple in the church of Lady GaGa. She still thought she was taking control of her sexuality by showing cleavage. She thought the barbed wire tat around her thigh was a sign of body confidence. She was excellent entertainment at parties, always first in line for drinking games and bicurious female kissing. Ensconced in late-night throngs of group inebriation, she would walk perilously close to the line of skankdom without ever quite going over.

Up until well into her pregnancy, it is fair to say that a truly maternal thought never crossed her mind. Harold, who was just forming in her womb at this point, was going to have to work if he was going to turn her into the sort of mother he deserved.

He began that work early and hard. As a fetus, Harold grew 250,000 brain cells every minute, and he had well over 20 billion of them by the time he was born. Soon his taste buds began to work, and he could tell when the amniotic fluid surrounding him turned sweet or garlicky, depending upon what his mother had for lunch. Fetuses swallow more of the fluid when sweetener is added. By seventeen weeks he was feeling his way around the womb. He began touching his umbilical cord and pressing his fingers together. By then he was also developing greater sensitivity to the world beyond. A fetus will withdraw from pain at five months. If somebody were to direct a bright flashlight directly at Julia’s belly, Harold could sense the light and move away.

By the third trimester, Harold was dreaming, or at least making the same sorts of eye movements that adults make when they dream. It was at this point that the real work of Operation Motherhood could begin. Harold was still a fetus, with barely any of the features of what we would call consciousness, but already he was listening, and memorizing the tone of his mother’s voice. After birth, babies will suck hard on a nipple in order to hear a recording of their mother’s voice, and much less hard to hear a recording of another woman’s voice.

He wasn’t only listening to tones, but also to the rhythms and patterns he would need to understand and communicate. French babies cry differently than babies who have heard German in the womb because they’ve absorbed the French lilt of their mother’s voices. Anthony J. DeCasper and others at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro had some mothers read The Cat in the Hat to their fetuses over a period of weeks. The fetuses remembered the tonal pattern of the story, and after they were born they’d suck more calmly and rhythmically on a pacifier than when they heard another story in a different meter.

Harold spent his nine months in the womb, growing and developing, and then one fine day, he was born. This wasn’t a particularly important event as far as his cognitive development was concerned, though he had a much better view.

Now he could get to work on his mother in earnest, eliminating Julia, the party girl, and creating Supermom Julia. First, he would have to build a set of bonds between them that would supersede all others. A few minutes old, wrapped in a blanket and lying on his mother’s chest, Harold was already a little bonding machine, and had a repertoire of skills to help him connect with those he loved.

In 1981 Andrew Meltzoff ushered in a new era of infant psychology when he stuck his tongue out at a forty-two-minute-old infant. The baby stuck her tongue out back at him. It was as if the baby, who had never seen a tongue in her life, intuited that the strange collection of shapes in front of her was a face, that the little thing in the middle of it was a tongue, that there was a creature behind the face, that the tongue was something other than herself, and that she herself had a corresponding little flap that she too could move around.

The experiment has been replicated with babies at different ages, and since then researchers have gone off in search of other infant abilities. They’ve found them. People once believed that babies were blank slates. But the more investigators look, the more impressed they have become with how much babies know at birth, and how much they learn in the first few months after.

The truth is, starting even before we are born, we inherit a great river of knowledge, a great flow of patterns coming from many ages and many sources. The information that comes from deep in the evolutionary past, we call genetics. The information revealed thousands of years ago, we call religion. The information passed along from hundreds of years ago, we call culture. The information passed along from decades ago, we call family, and the information offered years, months, days, or hours ago, we call education and advice.

But it is all information, and it all flows from the dead through us and to the unborn. The brain is adapted to the river of knowledge and its many currents and tributaries, and it exists as a creature of that river the way a trout exists in a stream. Our thoughts are profoundly molded by this long historic flow, and none of us exists, self-made, in isolation from it. So even a newborn possesses this rich legacy, and is built to absorb more, and to contribute back to this long current.

Though he still had no awareness of himself as a separate person, little Harold had a repertoire of skills to get Julia to fall in love with him. The first was his appearance. Harold had all the physical features that naturally attract a mother’s love: big eyes, a large forehead, a small mouth and chin. These features arouse deep responses in all humans, whether they are on babies or Mickey Mouse or E.T.

He also had the ability to gaze. Harold would lie next to Julia and stare at her face. After a few months, he developed a seductive sense of timing—when to look to attract Julia’s gaze, when to turn away, and then when to look back to attract her again. He would stare at her and she would gaze back. At an amazingly early age, he could pick out his mother’s face from a gallery of faces (and stare at it longer). He could tell the difference between a happy face and sad face. He became extremely good at reading faces, at noting tiny differences in muscular movements around the eyes and mouth. For example, six-month-old babies can spot the different facial features of different monkeys, even though, to adults, they all look the same.

Then there was touch. Harold felt a primeval longing to touch his mother as much and as often as possible. As Harry Harlow’s famous monkey experiments suggest, babies will forgo food in exchange for skin or even a towel that feels soft and nurturing. They’ll do it because physical contact is just as important as nourishment for their neural growth and survival. This kind of contact was also a life-altering deliciousness for Julia. Human skin has two types of receptors. One type transmits information to the somatosensory cortex for the identification and manipulation of objects. But the other type activates the social parts of the brain. It’s a form of body-to-body communication that sets off hormonal and chemical cascades, lowering blood pressure and delivering a sense of transcendent well-being. Harold would lie there on Julia’s chest, suckling at her nipple, forging a set of intimate connections that stimulated the growing cells in his brain. Julia would find herself suffused with a deep sense of fulfillment that she had never imagined before. Once, she actually caught herself wondering, “What do I need sex for? This is so much more satisfying.” This came from the woman who was voted “Most Likely to Appear in a Girls Gone Wild Video” while in college.

Then, and maybe most powerfully, there was smell. Harold just smelled wonderful. The subtle odor that arose from his hot little head penetrated deep into Julia’s being, creating a sense of connection she had never imagined before.

Finally, there was rhythm. Harold began imitating Julia. Just a few months old, Harold would open his mouth when Julia opened hers. He’d move his head from side to side when she moved her head from side to side. Soon, he could copy hand gestures.

In looking into Julia’s eyes, in touching her skin, in mimicking her gestures, Harold was starting a protoconversation, an unconscious volley of emotions, moods, and responses. Julia found herself playing along, staring into his eyes, getting him to open his mouth, getting him to shake his head.

Not long ago, a psychology class took advantage of the human capacity for this sort of protoconversation to play a trick on their professor. The class decided beforehand that they would look at him attentively when he lectured from the left side of the room but look away or appear distracted when he wandered over to the right side. As the class went on, the professor unconsciously stood more and more on the left side of the room. By the end, he was practically out the door. He had no idea what his students were doing, but he just felt better from that side of his room. His behavior was pulled by this invisible social gravity.

Of course Julia and Harold’s protoconversation was much deeper. Harold kept up Operation Motherhood with steady and relentless persistence, week after week, month after month, breaking down her barriers, rewiring her personality, insinuating himself in her every thought and feeling, gradually transforming her very identity.

The Invasion

Julia’s old personality battled back. You have to give her credit for that. She didn’t just surrender to this new creature without a struggle.

For most of the first year, Julia would breast-feed Harold from a chair in the corner of his room. At her baby shower, her friends, very few of whom had babies themselves, gave her the sorts of things they considered essential for successful nurturing. She had the audio and video baby monitors, the air purifier, the Baby Einstein mobiles, the dehumidifier, the electronic photo displays, the visually stimulating floor-mat, the rattles for manual dexterity, and the aurally soothing ocean-currents noise machine. She would sit there amidst all the gizmos, breast-feeding him, looking like a milkmaid Captain Kirk in the chair of the starship Enterprise.

One night, about seven months into Harold’s life, Julia was in the chair with Harold at her breast. The nightlight glowed softly and everything was quiet all around. It looked superficially like an idyllic maternal scene—a mother suckling her child, all filled with love and sweet affections. But if you could have read Julia’s mind at that moment, here’s what you would have found her saying: “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Help me! Help me! Will somebody please help me?”

At this moment—tired, oppressed, violated—she hated the little bastard. He’d entered her mind with tricks of sweet seduction, and once inside, he’d stomped over everything with the infant equivalent of jackboots.

He was half Cupid, half storm trooper. The greedy asshole wanted everything. Harold controlled the hours of her sleep, the span of her attention, the time she could shower, rest, or go to the bathroom. He controlled what she thought, how she looked, whether she cried. Julia was miserable and overwhelmed.

The average baby demands adult attention of one kind or another every twenty seconds. New mothers lose an average of seven hundred hours of sleep during that first year. Marital satisfaction plummets 70 percent, while the risk of maternal depression more than doubles. At the merest hint of discomfort Harold could let out a piercing scream that could leave Julia weeping in hysterics and Rob angry and miserable.

Exhausted, Julia would sit there in the chair, breast-feeding her little boy while thinking of the fat vessel she had become. Her thoughts raced through dark forests. She realized she would never again look as good in tight skirts. She’d never do anything on a whim. Instead, she’d get sucked into the vapid attitudes of the bourgeois mommy wars. She’d already come into contact with the pious breast-feeding crusaders (the über-boobers), the self-righteous playdate queens who would correct her parenting techniques (the sanctimommies), and the mopey martyr mommies who would bitch on endlessly about how rotten their lives were and how inconsiderate their husbands and parents had become. She’d get involved in those numbingly dull playground conversations, and as Jill Lepore once noted, they’d be all the same. The mothers would all want forgiveness, and the fathers would all want applause.

She could say farewell to the partygoing life that gave her such pleasure. Instead, Julia saw a grim future spreading out before her—school lunches, recycling sermons, strep tests, ear infections, and hours and hours spent praying for nap time. To top it all off, women who give birth to boys have shorter life expectancies because the boys’ testosterone can compromise their immune system.

Intertwined

Then, maybe a second after this anger and depression had flashed across her mind, Julia would lean back into the chair and hold Harold’s head up to her nose. Then Harold would lie on her chest, grab her pinkie with his little hand, and start suckling again. Little tears of joy and gratitude would well up in her eyes.

Kenneth Kaye has suggested that human infants are the only mammalian infants who nurse in bursts, sucking for a few seconds then pausing while the nipple is still in the mouth, and then resuming for another round. This pause, Kaye theorizes, induces the mother to jiggle her baby. When the baby is two days old, mothers jiggle for about three seconds. When the baby is a few weeks old, the jiggle is down to two.

These movements sent Julia and Harold into a sort of ballet with its own rhythm. Harold paused, Julia jiggled; Harold paused, Julia jiggled. It was a conversation. As Harold aged, this rhythm would continue. He’d look at her, and she’d look at him. Their world was structured by dialogue.

It’s almost musical the way the rhythm between mother and child evolves. Julia, no natural vocalist, found herself singing to him at the oddest moments—mostly, for some reason, songs from West Side Story. She read The Wall Street Journal to him in the morning and amused herself by reading every story that had to do with the Federal Reserve Board in motherese, the slow, exaggerated, singsong intonation that mothers in all cultures across the world use when speaking to their young.

Sometimes, as the months went by, she would begin impersonator training. She would mold her face into some expression and then get Harold to mimic until he looked like some celebrity. By scowling she could get him to look like Mussolini. By growling, Churchill. By opening her mouth and looking scared, Jerry Lewis. Sometimes when he smiled it was actually disconcerting. He gave a knowing, devious smile like some fraternity scuzzball who’d put a hidden camera in her shower.

Harold was so desperate to bond that, if the tempo of their conversation was interrupted, his whole world could fall to pieces. Scientists conduct a type of experiment they call “still-face” research. They ask a mother to interrupt her interactions with her child and adopt a blank, passive expression. Babies find this extremely disconcerting. They tense, cry, and fuss. Babies make a strenuous effort to regain their mother’s attention, and if there is still no response they, too, become passive and withdrawn. That’s because babies organize their internal states by seeing their own minds reflected back at them in the faces of others.

Except when Julia was completely exhausted, their conversations went on like a symphony. Harold’s energy was regulated by her energy. His brain was built by her brain.

By the ninth month, Harold still had no sense of self-awareness. He was still limited in so many ways. But he had done what he needed to do to survive and flourish. He had intertwined his mind with the mind of another. Out of this relationship his own faculties would grow.

It’s tempting to think that people grow like plants. You add nourishment to the seed, and an individual plant grows up. But that’s not so. Mammal brains grow properly only when they are able to interpenetrate with another. Rat pups who are licked and groomed by their mothers have more synaptic connections than rat pups who aren’t. Rats who are separated from their mothers for twenty-four hours lose twice as many brain cells in the cerebral and cerebellar cortices than rats who are not separated. Rats raised in interesting environments have 25 percent more synapses than those raised in ordinary cages. Though some mysterious emotional outpourings produce physical changes.

Back in the 1930s, H. M. Skeels studied mentally disabled orphans who were living in an institution but were subsequently adopted. After four years, their IQs diverged an amazing fifty points from those of the orphans who were not adopted. And the remarkable thing is that the kids who were adopted were not improved by tutoring and lecturing. The mothers who adopted them were also mentally disabled and living in a different institution. It was the mother’s love and attention that produced the IQ spike.

By now, Harold’s face lit up when Julia entered the room. This was good because Julia was coming apart at the seams. She hadn’t slept well in months. She once considered herself relatively tidy, but now her house looked like a corner of Rome after a visit from the barbarian hordes. Franklin Roosevelt was able to launch the New Deal in the amount of time that had passed since her last witty observation. But in the mornings Harold let out a big smile and he got to live another day.

One morning, it dawned on Julia that she knew Harold better than any other person on earth. She knew the ways in which he needed her. She knew his difficulty in making transitions from one setting to another. She sensed, sadly, that he seemed to long for some sort of connection from her that she would never be able to offer.

Yet they had never actually exchanged a word of conversation. Harold didn’t talk. They got to know each other largely through touch, tears, looks, smell, and laughter. Julia had always assumed that meanings and concepts came through language, but now she realized that it was possible to have a complex human relationship without words.

Mirror Neurons

Philosophers have long argued about the process people use to understand one another. Some believe that we are careful theorizers. We come up with hypotheses about how other people will behave, and then test those hypotheses against the evidence we observe minute by minute. In this theory, people come across as rational scientists, constantly weighing evidence and testing explanations. And there’s clear evidence that this sort of hypothesis testing is part of how we understand one another. But these days most of the research points to the primacy of a rival hypothesis: that we automatically simulate others, and understand what others feel by feeling a version of what they are experiencing, in ourselves. In this view, people aren’t cold theorizers who are making judgments about other creatures. They are unconscious Method actors who understand by sharing or at least simulating the responses they see in the people around them. We’re able to function in a social world because we partially permeate each other’s minds and understand—some people more, some people less. Human beings understand others in themselves, and they form themselves by reenacting the internal processes they pick up from others.

In 1992 researchers at the University of Parma in Italy were studying the brains of macaque monkeys, when they noticed a strange phenomenon. When a monkey saw a human researcher grab a peanut and bring it to his mouth, the monkey’s brain would fire just as if the monkey were itself grabbing a peanut and bringing it to its own mouth, even though the monkey wasn’t actually moving at all. The monkey was automatically simulating the mental processes it observed in another.

So was born the theory of mirror neurons, the idea that we have in our heads neurons that automatically re-create the mental patterns of those around us. Mirror neurons are not physically different from any other sort of neuron; it’s the way the former are connected that seems to enable them to perform this remarkable task of deep imitation.

Over the last few years mirror neurons have become one of the most hyped and debated issues in all of neuroscience. Some scientists believe mirror neurons are akin to DNA, and will revolutionize our understanding of how people internally process outer experiences, how we learn from and communicate with others. Others think the whole idea is vastly overblown. They are quick to point out that the phrase “mirror neurons” is patently misleading because it suggests the mimicking skill is contained in the neurons, not in the networks in the brain. But there does seem to be a widely held view that monkey and human brains have an automatic ability to perform deep imitation, and in this way share mental processes across the invisible space between them. As Marco Iacoboni has observed, people are able to feel what others experience as if it were happening to them.

The monkeys in Parma not only mimicked the actions they observed, they seemed to unconsciously evaluate the intentions behind them. Their neurons fired intensely when a glass was picked up in a context that suggested drinking, but they did not fire the same way when an empty glass was picked up in a context that suggested cleaning up. The monkey’s brains would not fire when scientists merely pantomimed picking up a raisin, but they did fire when the scientists picked up a real raisin. Their neurons fired in a certain characteristic pattern when they saw a scientist tearing a piece of paper, but they also fired in that same pattern when they merely heard a scientist tearing paper. In other words these weren’t mere “monkey see, monkey do” imitations of physical actions. The way the brains reacted to an action was inextricably linked to the goal implied by the action. We sometimes assume that the mental process of perceiving an action is distinct from the mental process of evaluating an action. But in these examples, the processes of perception and evaluation are all intermingled. They share the same representational systems, the same network patterns in the brain.

Since those original experiments in Italy, many scientists, including Iacoboni, believe they have found mirror neurons in humans. Human mirror neurons help people interpret the intention of an action, although unlike monkey mirror neurons, they seem to be able to imitate an action even when no goal is detected. A woman’s brain will respond with a certain pattern as she watches a person use two fingers to pick up a wineglass, but her brain will respond in a different way as she watches a person use two fingers and the same action to pick up a toothbrush. Her brain will respond one way when it watches another human in the act of speaking, but a different way when it watches a monkey in the act of chattering.

When people watch a chase scene in a movie, they respond as if they were actually being chased, except at lower intensity. When they look at pornography, their brains respond as if they were actually having sex, except at lower intensity. When Harold watched Julia look down lovingly at him, he presumably reenacted the activity in her brain, and learned how love feels and works from the inside.

Harold would grow up to be a promiscuous imitator, and this helped him in all sorts of ways. Carol Eckerman, a psychology professor at Duke, has conducted research suggesting that the more a child plays imitation games, the more likely it is that the child will become an early fluent speaker. Tanya Chartrand and John Bargh found that the more two people imitate each other’s movements, the more they like each other—and the more they like each other, the more they imitate. Many scientists believe that the ability to unconsciously share another’s pain is a building block of empathy, and through that emotion, morality.

However the science on mirror neurons eventually shakes out, the theory gives us a vehicle to explain a phenomenon we see every day, and never as much as in the relationship between parents and child. Minds are intensely permeable. Loops exist between brains. The same thought and feeling can arise in different minds, with invisible networks filling the space between them.

Make ’Em Laugh

One day, months and months later, Julia, Rob, and Harold were sitting around the table at dinner when Rob, absentmindedly, dropped a tennis ball on the table. Harold exploded in peals of laughter. Rob dropped it again. Harold’s mouth opened wide. His eyes crinkled. His body quaked. A little bump of tissue rose between his eyebrows, and the sound of rapturous laughter filled the room. Rob held the ball above the table, and they all sat there frozen in anticipation. Then he let it bounce a few times, and Harold exploded with glee, even louder than before. He sat there in his pajamas, his tiny hands oddly still, transported by laughter. Rob and Julia had tears coming out of their eyes, they were laughing so hard along with him. Rob kept doing it over and over. Harold would stare in anticipation of the ball being dropped and then let rip with squeals of delight when he saw it bounce, his head bobbing, his tongue trembling, his eyes moving delightedly from face to face. Rob and Julia matched him squeal for squeal, their voices blending and modulating with his.

These were the best moments of their days—the little games of peekaboo, the wrestling and tickling on the floor. Sometimes Julia would hold a little washcloth in her mouth over the changing table, and Harold would grab it and hilariously try to cram it back in. It was the repetition of predictable surprise that sent Harold into ecstasy. The games gave him a sense of mastery—that he was beginning to understand the patterns of the world. They gave him that sensation—which is something like pure joy for babies—of feeling in perfect synchronicity with Mom and Dad.

Laughter exists for a reason, and it probably existed before humans developed language. Robert Provine of the University of Maryland has found that people are thirty times more likely to laugh when they are with other people than when they are alone. When people are in bonding situations, laughter flows. Surprisingly, people who are speaking are 46 percent more likely to laugh during conversation than people who are listening. And they’re not exactly laughing at hilarious punch lines. Only 15 percent of the sentences that trigger laughter are funny in any discernable way. Instead, laughter seems to bubble up spontaneously amidst conversation when people feel themselves responding in parallel ways to the same emotionally positive circumstances.

Some jokes, like puns, are asocial and are often relished by those suffering from autism. But most jokes are intensely social and bubble up when people find a solution to some social incongruity. Laughter is a language that people use to bond, to cover over social awkwardness or to reinforce bonding that has already occurred. This can be good, as when a crowd laughs together, or bad, as when a crowd ridicules a victim, but laughter and solidarity go together. As Steven Johnson has written, “Laughing is not an instinctive physical response to humor, the way a flinch responds to pain or a shiver to cold. It’s an instinctive form of social bonding that humor is crafted to exploit.”

Night after night, Harold and his parents would try to fall into rhythm with one another. Sometimes they failed. Rob and Julia would be unable to get inside Harold’s mind and figure out what he needed to soothe his agony. Sometimes they succeeded. And when they did, laughter was the reward.

If you had to step back and ask where Harold came from, you could give a biological answer, and explain conception and pregnancy and birth. But if you really wanted to explain where the essence of Harold—or the essence of any person—came from, you would have to say that first there was a relationship between Harold and his parents. And that relationship had certain qualities. And then, as Harold matured and developed self-consciousness, those qualities became individualized, and came to exist in him even when he was apart from his parents. That is to say, people don’t develop first and create relationships. People are born into relationships—with parents, with ancestors—and those relationships create people. Or, to put it a different way, a brain is something that is contained within a single skull. A mind only exists within a network. It is the result of the interaction between brains, and it is important not to confuse brains with minds.

As Samuel Taylor Coleridge once observed, “Ere yet a conscious self exists, the love begins; and the first love is love of another. The Babe acknowledges a self in the Mother’s form years before it can recognize a self in its own.”

Coleridge described how his own child, then three years old, awoke during the night and called out to his mother. “Touch me, only touch me with your finger,” the young boy pleaded. The child’s mother was astonished.

“Why?” she asked.

“I’m not here,” the boy cried. “Touch me, Mother, so that I may be here.”