Last updated: Sat, Mar 22, 2025
Everybody's doing a brand new dance now....
We love to watch one another, to do line-dancing and folk-dancing, march in parades, and watch others dancing or playing sports. Why is this, and why do we feel like we're on the field or court while we watch sports?
The answer isn't fully known. As long ago as the 1980s neuroscientists in Italy identified neurons in the brains of macaque monkeys that fired both when the subject performed an action and when they saw another monkey (or a human) perform the same action. The investigators were able to identify such neurons by monitoring the activity of single neurons, a process which is destructive to the subject.
They named such neurons "mirron neurons," because they reflect or (mentally) mimic the behavior of other individuals. Why should mirror neurons exist? This is a more difficult problem than discovering that they do exist, and the jury's still out. One theory is that this ability facilitates learning by imitation. If we can rehearse another's actions in our own minds, it should be easier for us to duplicate them. Another theory is that this ability helps us to infer the intentions of others' actions. Additional hypotheses are more complex. It's been speculated that this mirror capability might be important in language, especially in conjunction with theories that spoken language may have begun with communicating through pantomime or charade.
It's been shown in macaques, for example, that mirror neurons involved with the action of ripping a piece of paper can be triggered by the sound of paper ripping. This indicates that the mirror neurons can be actuated not only by vision but by association with auditory input. It suggests that mirror neurons may have a role in both predicting and interpreting the intent of others' actions.
Mirron neurons can't be experimentally monitored in humans as they can be in macaques or other animals. One exception is during certain neurosurgeries, when tiny electrodes are inserted into live and conscious brains for the purpose of locating certain brain structures, as in some epilepsies. Neuro-imaging, MRI and fMRI, has found mirror-like behavior in several of the human brain centers that are involved in planning motions. Because of this data, it is generally accepted that humans also have mirror capabilities.
(See the Wikipedia entry Mirror neuron for an overview on mirror neurons, or see "Mirroring People," Marco Iacoboni, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.)
Whatever we may eventually learn about the role of mirror neurons in our mental lives, their logic depends on our similarities. Macaques can use mirror capabilities to read their human overlords because macaques are mechanically and neurologically analagous to humans. It is reasonable to think that we innately expect others to be reliably like us, otherwise such a system would be unreliable.
The word "empathy" is often used to include both our conception of another's experience or feeling-state and our sympathy with them. I'd like to focus on just the sense of the other's situation or experience, ignoring our sympathetic or non-sympathetic feelings about them. Looking through that frame, mirror neurons suggest that this component of empathy is largely based on the assumption that others are like us.
We know that we use additional channels of information when we assess others: our life experiences, their faces and bodies, our past experience with that individual and others, and so on. We also know that these other channels are difficult to interpret correctly and are subject to noise and even deception. One of the great social disruptors in recent decades is the realization that it takes effort to understand experiences that we don't share.
We also know that our intellect and our emotions can lead us to different places. Some background for that topic is found in the following section, Folk or Cultural Understandings. Pain is an emotional subject, both to those who suffer and to those who suffer exposure to pain sufferers. This is a recurring topic in this work.
My emphasis in the current section, "Instinctive or Intuitive Understanding" of pain, has been to point out that our intuitive thinking is error-prone but effortless. Intellectual understandings are effortful. Emotion comes from a place in our cognition that can fairly be called primitive and it is relatively effortless and quite powerful.
Neuroscience since the 1990s has been revealing a new understanding of how emotion works. This new view is so significant to our understanding of the experience of pain that I've described it in contrast to traditional psychological views in the section A Rational Model of Emotion and Pain.
In brief, emotion is motivation and motivation has basic biologic importance. We are adapted to care about certain things, and we feel strongly about those things. Think hunger and thirst, or pain, but also social relationships. We are born with certain motivations and not with others. Geneticists and evolutionary (adaptational) biologists are progressively building the case that our inbuilt natures pursue a different logic than our mature minds might approve of. David Haig, one of these evolutionary biologists and geneticists, quipped that "his genes could not care less about him, and he feels the same way toward them."1
His meaning is that genes serve the goal of biological success, which is only survival and reproduction. His genes don't know or care what his personal aspirations or moral sense are. They don't care if he's happy or sad, except as it affects biological success. The genes have their own agenda. (His view, like the theory of "selfish genes," is the result of his own lifelong study of genes, but isn't consistently shared among social scientists.)
Seeing is believing, but you can't see pain. More particularly, we can't directly perceive the pain experienced by others. In contrast, you can see a cut, a burn, or a cast. Most of the methods we can use to gauge another's pain experience are unreliable. We may see the pain sufferer's behavior, but we don't know what causes their behavior, nor do we know whether the sufferer is trying to suppress or to highlight their pain signaling. We may hear their description of their experience, but we may not be able to "feel their pain." A later section, Pain Measurement, explains that this is true not only in ordinary life, but also in the doctor's clinic or the researcher's lab.
This leaves a large opportunity for misunderstandings. Regular folks don't even think about pain unless they're in the midst of a painful period, and can interpret pain-related behavior in almost any way you can imagine. Ancillary staff in the pain clinic don't necessarily have any special sensitivity to pain-related impairments. The "subjectivity" of pain and the unreliability of external interpretations cause a problem for doctors and others who treat painful conditions. They are trained to prefer "objective" signs to "subjective" symptoms, and this has a big effect on their behavior towards the patients in their clinics. I discuss some of this in Medical Pain Treatment and The Pain Institutions.
As long ago as 1969, researchers had shown that we show signs of physiological arousal when we only think about or imagine painful experiences. By 1992, other researchers found that discussing or imagining painful events caused increases in heart rate, skin conductance (caused by increased sweating), and increased electrical activity in the frontalis muscle of the forehead. Pain sufferers are especially prone to such reactions.
In 1999 pain sufferers were observed to experience elevated muscle tension when they saw others performing activities that provoked pain in themselves. Other studies from the 1990s showed that chronic pain patients tend to remember their own life experiences more negatively than non-sufferers, even when they are in periods of reduced pain.2
We all know that pain is painful, and we're all prone to be physically uncomfortable in the presence of it, whether we see it or hear about it. Besides this, we who suffer pain tend to be downers.