Through the Looking Glass: Mirror Neurons and Moral Nonsense

by Gina Stepp

Scanning the past week’s news, one gets the distinct impression there has been an unusually high number of “man’s inhumanity to man” stories. Darfur, Iraq, Lebanon, Israel. Kidnapped children, boys arrested for planning an attack on their school, and a murdered family in a Dallas suburb. A familiar question tugs at the edges of consciousness when we begin to feel the human experience is laden with these kinds of stories. Does the fact that there is so much cruelty to report speak to the lack of morality in human nature, or conversely to the presence of a moral conscience of some sort? This intriguing question was addressed by James Q. Wilson in his 1993 book, The Moral Sense, but it deserves revisiting in the light of more current understanding.

When considering why “bloodletting and savagery are news,” Wilson proposes, “There are two answers. The first is that they are unusual. If daily life were simply a war of all against all, what would be newsworthy would be the occasional outbreak of compassion and decency, self-restraint and fair dealing.” The second answer is not far off the first: Wilson says misery is news because it is shocking to us. “We recoil in horror at pictures of starving children, death camp victims, and greedy looters.” Wilson believes there is a “moral sense” in us that makes us able to empathize with one another. His book presents some very convincing arguments and is not devoid of science, but his problem, he admitted, was in finding hard scientific evidence to prove the existence of this “sense.”

Only three years after Wilson’s book was published, three Italian neuroscientists (Vittorio Gallese, Giacomo Rizzolatti, and Leonardo Fogassi) accidentally discovered something that could prove to be the scientific credence Wilson was looking for. During a study of monkey neurons and how they discharge while performing goal-related hand actions like picking up peanuts, the scientists found that the neurons also charged when the monkey observed one of the scientists performing the same action. After further studies, the scientists concluded that “to perceive an action is equivalent to internally simulating it. This enables the observer to use her/his own resources to experientially penetrate the world of the other by means of a direct, automatic, and unconscious process of simulation.” They called the responsible neurons “mirror neurons,” and extended their studies to explore the same phenomenon related to emotions. What the researchers described as the “activation of a neural mechanism shared by the observer and the observed to enable direct experiential understanding” is what the rest of us call “empathy.”

Other cognitive scientists have carried these studies even further and found that the mechanisms related to mirror neurons seem to be defective in autism—thus explaining the social impairments of people with that pathology.

Does this mean that mirror neurons and the resulting capability for empathy are, in some small part, the underpinning of our “moral sense”? Even if this is so—there must be more to learn. As human beings, our abilities to apply empathy go far beyond that of a monkey. While monkeys seem able to anticipate or empathize with “motor” activities that they themselves have experienced, human beings are capable in varying degrees of empathizing with others who experience things they themselves have not.

I say “in varying degrees” because there are obviously those amongst us whose abilities to empathize are impaired, even if not to the same degree as autistics. And this brings us back to the week’s news.

If man’s inhumanity to man is a reflection of his mirror neurons and a somehow impaired ability to empathize, there may still be hope for change. Neuroscientists now know that the brain is capable of developing new neurons at any age—a process known as “neurogenesis.” But the brain's plasticity is notable even in the absence of neurogenesis. Jeffrey Schwartz of UCLA, for example, has had considerable success in treating OCD patients by establishing new patterns of behaviour to replace old ones, thereby creating new connections between existing neurons.

Does this mean “old dogs” can be taught “new tricks”? Could new patterns of moral behaviour encourage the development of new neurons, even of new “mirror” neurons? Can we build on our basic "moral sense," become more “empathic," thereby reducing instances of man’s inhumanity to man? If so, maybe it’s time to think about which new behaviors might best replace the old. If not—we should simply resign ourselves to the status quo and ignore whatever feelings of disgust may be awakened by the inevitable headlines on CNN.

Dogged! Pluto Stripped of Planetary Status

by Gina Stepp

Christine Lavin’s folk albums have been enjoyed in our house since before my oldest child was born. Of course, if you aren't familiar with the singer, you may well wonder why her name opens an article purporting to discuss the latest news about Pluto. (You know – that heavenly body formerly known as a planet.) It’s not a complicated story really, but a little background information might help.

It all started back in 1996 when Lavin wrote a song entitled Planet X, her musings sparked by a USA Today article about the controversy surrounding Pluto’s planetary status. After a brief rhyming history of Pluto’s discovery and the scientific arguments over its importance, she asked the question,

But how are we going to deal with it
if science comes up with the proof
that Pluto was never a planet.
How do we handle this truth?
As the PhD's all disagree
we don't know yet who's wrong or who's right
but wherever you are, whatever you are,
Pluto, we know you're out there tonight.

We found the song (and the question) amusing, but we never really expected events to come to a head as they did this week when Pluto’s status was decided once and for all at a meeting in Prague of the International Astronomical Union. This, apparently, is the body that sets standards for the field of astronomy, which means they have always had the power to demote Pluto to a lowly Kuiper Belt object (KBO), Trans-Neptunal object (TNO), or even a “Plutino.” Plutinos, by the way, are objects that orbit the sun beyond Neptune. Most are much smaller than Pluto and are believed to be similar to comets, but they are defined by orbital patterns which resemble Pluto's. This of course makes it all a bit confusing. How does one imagine classifying Pluto among its own namesakes? And incidentally, are they going to have to rename plutonium now?

More to the point, why does the International Astronomical Union even care? Why all the fuss over a tiny frozen planet whose only real value to the universe was (thanks to a little help from Walt Disney) its ability to capture the imaginations of school-children on a planet more sure of its status a couple of billion miles away?

The truth is that Pluto was beginning to make the solar system seem a bit more complicated than the average astronomer likes. As more and more “bodies” are making themselves known at the edges of our solar system, Pluto has begun looking less and less like another planet, and more and more like the rest of the non-descript and far-flung debris littering space. This has resulted in increasing scientific disdain for the ninth planet, despite the fact that new discoveries reveal Pluto has at least three of its own moons, which would give any of the rest of us a great deal of significance if we could boast such a thing. Nevertheless, astronomers began to think that if they allowed Pluto to join the planetary club, the door might have to be opened to dozens or even hundreds more. At the very least, they would certainly have to admit a tenth body discovered last year which is even further from the sun than Pluto but seems to be slightly larger and has been popularly nicknamed "Xena." As long ago as 1996, Christine Lavin could see where all this was going:

and now 20 astronomy textbooks
refer to Pluto as less than a planet
I guess if Pluto showed up at a planet convention
the bouncer at the door might have to ban it.

On the other hand, the International Astronomical Union may have done Pluto a good turn. If the IAU had given Pluto the thumbs up and with it hundreds of other “planets,” one might imagine the beleaguered entity responding in Groucho Marx style, with the words:

“Please accept my resignation from the solar system. I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member.”