april 30th, 2008

Kaila McIntyre-Bader

April 30^th, 2008

Throughout this week’s readings, I noticed that mirror neurons seem to be neuroscience’s current Messiah. The excitement they are causing and the weight scientists are putting on them is remarkable. It seems that mirror neurons just may help bring us a step closer to figuring out the seemingly impossible problem of consciousness.

Social cognition is a way of sharing experiences and a view of the world that depends on the exchange of signals and is highly beneficial to survival. The chameleon effect was mentioned in a couple of the articles, and it was interesting to read about such a common phenomenon being described in such scientific terms. “When we interact with someone we often mirror each other’s movements and mannerisms. We are unaware of this mirroring, but when it occurs it creates the feeling that we have good rapport with each other- the chameleon effect. Interestingly, the rapport associated with the chameleon effect may be destroyed if we become aware that we are being imitated. Instead we may feel we are being mocked”(Frith and Frith, 2007). This reminds me of many occurrences in everyday social life. How many times have you watched or experienced two people getting to know each other, initially mirroring each other to show enthusiasm and engagement, but later on becoming irritated by that person for picking up too many of their mannerisms? This idea also sparked a question in my mind about the innateness of self-absorption. Are humans generally Narcissists? Does mirroring make us feel we have good rapport with another person because they are reminding us of ourselves? Or how much of it is being comforted by the familiar? Lately I’ve been noticing examples of the contagiousness of facial expressions and body postures everywhere I go.

Frith and Frith also bring up social referencing, and reflect on how we use other people’s emotional reactions to learn about novel situations. Infants tend to avoid touching a toy if the mother shows fear, but if she is showing pleasure it will explore it. But there are some reactions that seem to be programmed in the brain. “Infant monkeys who had never met a snake… rapidly acquired fear of snakes when observing a model in a video being afraid of a snake. In contrast, they did not acquire fear of a flower even after 12 trials of observation. By it’s evolutionary history the brain is pre-prepared to learn archaically threatening stimuli.”

I found the apparent innateness of prejudice and racism to be slightly startling. Several of the articles commented on an experiment in which the subjects were shown black faces and the fear reaction that came with it. I found it particularly interesting, though, that “consciously held attitudes about race are often at variance with our implicit prejudices, and there is evidence that we try to suppress these rapid automatic responses” (Frith and Frith, 2006). The amygdala response to these black faces was reduced when the faces were presented for longer, and there was increased activity in the areas of frontal cortex concerned with control and regulation. While I’m not sure about how I feel about this implicit reaction to a face of a certain skin color, I do find it fascinating that making alliances with fortunate groups of people is an evolutionary benefit, thus we may tend to harbor negative feelings toward the disadvantaged. But how does this work with empathy? What is the balance between survival of the fittest and being capable of feeling sorry for a group of people because we can see their point of view and want to help them?

I would love to discuss in class the difference between empathy for those we know and those we don’t know, and the processing for empathy for positive and negative emotions, as well as non-human or robotic empathy. The experiments with eye gaze and robots is crazy. Do we try and access things’ mental states if we know they aren’t the same as we are?

Apparently sometimes we do. Abstract shapes such as triangles can be made to move about in such a way that views will readily attribute emotions, desires, and false beliefs to them. This reminds of a stage in childhood development and magical thinking. I definitely remember giving my forks and spoons personality traits. (Is that weird?)

I also found the idea of awareness of self is really aware of self as others see us intriguing. How much of what we believe about ourselves is internal, and how much is it affected by how others perceive us?

I particularly enjoyed the ending of the “How we predict what other people are going to do” article: “It is likely that almost all our speculations will turn out to be wrong…”