“Here is a lump of flesh, about three pounds, which you can hold in the palm of your hand. But it can contemplate the vastness of interstellar space. It can contemplate the idea of God, the meaning of infinity, and about itself contemplating the meaning of infinity. And this is truly the most amazing thing in the world.”, V.S. Ramachandran, on brain
I have been watching couple of interesting talks by Dr VS Ramachandran, an imminent neurologists who had been doing research on various aspects of brain and neurons specifically. Neurons are those strands that sit inside the brain and forms the complex circuitry making decision varying from the insignificant zero to the unfathomable infinity. There are many classified types of neurons that is designated for various kind of processing. One interesting topic that he talked about was on a recent discovery of something called the mirror neurons. Going 4000 years back, closeness of all the early inventions like the invention of wheel, fire, self-awareness, civilization etc had always baffled the archeologists as to what made them wait for 3000 years to make the first civilization or discovery of mind and gods in spite of having the same brain formation. What the recent studies have indicated is that at that point of time something evolved in brain which didn’t exist for other animals, something that helped humans to learn and understand things and eventually evolve from a simple animal into a complex personality, a bunch of neurons that apparently has an ability to empathize and emulate from its surroundings as opposed to the basic motor neurons(the one that works on command from senses).
Mirror neurons form a cluster of neurons sitting on the front portion of the brain. What it does is, it tries to mirror the events that it ‘sees’. For instance, if you are pinched on your hand you would instantly know the pain, which is quite natural as there is physical connection between the skin and the brain. But a similar pain is felt when you see someone else being pinched, in a way you tend to empathize with that person. But what tells you that it is painful?. When we see someone cry a similar emotional thing tries to send us to the same state, why? Ramachandran speaks how the discovery of mirror neurons or empathy neurons gave the neurologists an answer to all these questions.
Getting back to the evolution of human beings, the formation of mirror facilitated the Lamarckian evolution, named after Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. While Darwinian theory was slow and involved physical transformation, Lamarckian was quick and evolved brain instead of physique. The example he quoted was, for a Polar bear it must have taken about 1000s of years to evolve itself with the thick white coat to survive in the polar region – this is the Darwinian evolution. A boy learns by watching his father kill that polar bear, skin it and use that fluffy coat to survive in the polar region, in a matter of 10 minutes – that is the Lamarckian evolution. There is a saying in Malayalam “kaateethu kaatunnavan kurangan”(the one who imitate others are monkeys). This saying is not a non-sense but a very sensible one as it is from the times of hominids (with chances of spreading this into the monkey cousins) that he/she started learning things by observation.
The mirror neurons are quick in capturing the ‘characteristic images’ in the brain and is quick in reproducing it later, it appears. How it works is, say we see one person getting beaten up. The brain gets a signal from mirror neurons telling that getting beaten up on arm is painful (as if it is his/her hand that is getting thrashed), the brain tries to verify that with the nerves from the arm and finds that it is not true. Then a cancellation signal goes and cancels the physical pain ‘application’, but it cannot cancel the emotional bit of the pain. So when we see someone beating a kid, we don’t feel the physical pain but we do feel the emotional pain(empathy). The interesting thing is, when the arm of this person is paralyzed or amputated there is no nerves connecting the arm with brain. Hence at that stage the brain cannot cross check the genuineness of the pain. Upon experimentation, what the neurologists have found is that people with such syndromes can even feel the physical pain. So which means if you try to pinch your arm in front of another person who doesn’t have that arm he feels the exact physical pain that you just felt, in his phantom arm!!. This is used by neurologists and physiotherapists to cure ‘learnt paralysis’ - A person sitting opposite to the patient massages or exercise his own hand, the patient in turn gets the real feel of the massage and eventually gets cured.
He points out the formation of civilization and its development by accounting it under the development of mirror neurons. How a person become insensitive after being tortured for a while, how a child learns about smoking by just seeing from his/her parent, despite of many no-smoking signs etc implies the significance of understanding the surroundings a key to human development. Ramachandran nicknames this as ‘Gandhi neuron’ as it gave humans the ability to understand each other without a physical connection. He is quite right in calling this the real facebook that connects one human being to another without any wire.
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