Chapter 9: Agency—Nourished
by Happiness
An Italian neuroscientist, Giacomo Rizzolatti, first
identified what are called mirror neurons. We all have them. In fact, all
primates have them, but humans have by far the most sophisticated system. The
human brain contains about one hundred billion neurons that communicate with each other in
staggeringly complex ways in fractions of a nanosecond. Mirror neurons are
found in the area of the brain that controls motions, such as picking up a
peanut and putting it in your mouth. Mirror neurons got their
name because they give us the ability to mirror the feelings of others, feel
what they feel and sense their moods as if they were our own. The word empathy defines the result, which
science has never been able to explain until recently.
Dr. Rizzolatti can’t remember for sure what the motion
was when he first observed the mirror neurons. It might have been someone
eating a peanut or licking an ice cream cone, but whatever it was, he witnessed
something amazing. He had wired a monkey’s brain to light up when the monkey
performed an action such as picking up a peanut. What was so incredible was
when the monkey saw a lab assistant pick up a peanut, the same neurons that had
fired when the monkey picked up a peanut fired in the same way when the lab
assistant picked up a peanut. This was break-through science. This was more
than vicariously experiencing something happening to someone else. The brain
responded the same way whether the monkey did the action or whether he merely
sat still with his hands in his lap and watched someone else perform the
action. Our mirror neurons also light up in the same way when fictional or
cartoon characters do an action or perform a task.
This ability to empathize also gives us the ability to
“read” each other’s intentions and predict what others are going to do. That’s
why we cry in sad movies and smile back when someone smiles at us, and cry when
others cry. Amazingly, you receive this complex information naturally without
conscious thought. It just happens. Marco Iaconboni, a neuroscientist who wrote
Mirroring People: The Science of How We
Connect to Others, said: “If I see someone smiling,
then I smile. If I see someone crying, then I know exactly what they are going
through because my mirror neurons are firing in my brain as if I am actually
smiling or crying.” Dr. Iaconboni believes the human brain is “wired to be empathetic
and good,” as shown in one of his experiments.
“Dr. Iacoboni performed a fascinating experiment where he
and his colleagues showed Democrats and Republicans photographs of candidates
during the 2004 election. Whenever someone saw an image of a politician in his
or her own party, that individual’s mirror neurons fired strongly, and he or
she empathized with his or her fellow party members. It is easy to imagine
being that politician. When that same individual recognized the image of
someone in the opposite party, Iacoboni’s team saw a remarkable sequence of
activity was triggered. The observer’s mirror neurons fired first,
indicating a natural empathy. Then his or her logical conscious mind kicked in
and suppressed the mirror neurons. In
other words, observers started initially to empathize but then quelled this
natural reaction with logical thought. The implication of this sequence is
significant. It means that our natural impulse is to empathize with others or,
in the words of Iacoboni, ‘to create an immediate emotional connection with
people.’ It is only after we label someone as belonging to a different
group, as being Republican or Democrat for example, that we consciously force
away that emotional connection.’”
I had a personal experience to validate this type of
reaction only in reverse. I am a docent in the Museum of Church History in Salt
Lake City, Utah. The history of the Church of Jesus Christ Latter-day Saints is
one of my passions, so it’s not surprising I would volunteer in the museum.
Since there has been a negative bias against the Church since 1820, from time
to time detractors come to the museum and confront docents. Recently a woman
and her college-age daughter came into the museum and challenged my beliefs
with barbed questions and accusations. When I realize these women had an agenda
and weren’t in the museum to enjoy the magnificent art and artifacts, I
answered a couple of questions and wished them a good day. I left them to talk
to other museum visitors who were in the museum to learn and enjoy. Then my
shift ended and I was preparing to leave when another docent came to me and
said there were two women who wanted to ask me another question. Earlier in the
day I had been to the dentist because I had broken off a large chunk of a
molar, and my tooth had started throbbing and I felt a little dizzy. When I
walked up to the women I could feel their animosity and I also felt sick. I
said, “I understand you have another question. Do you mind if we sit down to
talk? I went to the dentist earlier today and my tooth is throbbing.” The
change was astonishing. “Of course,” they both said. Then as we walked to a
bench they asked what was wrong with my tooth. The daughter told me of a
similar experience she had had recently, and we chatted about common dental
problems. When I redirected the conversation back to their questions, their
hostility was gone. In a respectful way they ask me a couple more questions and
we parted as friends. Daniel Goleman, in writing about mirror neurons,
explained this process “allow(s) us to grasp the minds of others not through
conceptual reasoning but through direct simulation; by feeling, not by
thinking…. This interbrain linkage makes bodies move in tandem, thoughts go
down the same roads, and emotions run along the same lines. As mirror neurons bridge
brains, they create a tacit duet that opens the way for subtle but powerful
transactions” (Goleman 43). Isn’t that a wonderful image: “As mirror neurons bridge brains, they create a tacit duet that opens the way for subtle but powerful transactions.”
These powerful transactions accomplished by mirror
neurons when added to the studies of Paul Ekman, PH.D, a professor of
psychology at the University of California Medical School in San Francisco,
bring to the forefront a way and the means to change ourselves and others. Dr.
Ekman spent a year learning to control the almost two hundred muscles in his
face. As he gazed into a mirror, he identified eighteen types of smiles. In
telling about Ekman’s experiments Daniel Goleman said: “Smiles have an edge over
all other emotional expressions: the human brain prefers happy faces,
recognizing them more readily and quickly than those with negative
expressions—an effect known as the ‘happy face advantage.’ Some neuroscientists
suggest the brain has a system for positive feelings that stays primed for
activity, causing people to be in upbeat moods more often than negative, and to
have a more positive outlook on life” (Goleman 44).
That’s what happened in the museum. The fact that I had a
toothache made me real. They felt my pain which created a bridge and we danced
in a subtle but powerful duet. I’m convinced were are wired to love and serve
each other and live happily because our mirror neurons allow us to feel, really
honestly feel, each other’s humanness. We are built to share and be open. We
aren’t wired to be enemies—not politically, religiously, racially, culturally,
or in any other way. We only become enemies when we suppress or override what
are mirror neurons are feeling. This unspoken correspondence, the ability we
all have to build a bridge to connect with another’s brain has been a
science-fiction theme. Yet it is real and happens moment by moment every day.
When a person smiles at you, the mirror neurons fire and
your face reflects back what you see on the other person’s face. Statistically
about three-fourths of the people to whom you give a genuine smile will smile
back at you. Smiling is the simplest and cheapest makeover possible. As Annie
says to Daddy Warbucks, “You’re never fully dressed without a smile.” Smiling
can change the world because all those other brains out there have mirror
neurons that will mimic your smile. A list of the advantages smiling brings
would include:
·
Smiling makes your face more attractive;
·
Smiling helps you feel better about yourself;
·
Smiling scientifically verifies the words
your mother said to you on a day you were feeling blue “Put on a happy face and
you’ll feel better”;
·
Smiling lifts your mood even if you only
smile at yourself in the mirror;
·
Smiling improves your health and decreases
your stress level;
·
Smiling back at someone proves “what goes
around comes around.”
No doubt a lot of smiling was going on between Mr. and
Mrs. Wilkins when in Enchanted April Elizabeth
Von Arnim wrote “He was determined to please, and he did please. He was most
amible to his wife—not only in public, which she was used to, but in private,
when he certainly wouldn’t have been if he hadn’t wanted to. He did want to….
And the more he treated her as though she were really very nice, the more Lotty
expanded and became really very nice, and the more he, affected in his turn,
became really very nice himself; so that they went round and round, not in a
vicious but in a highly virtuous circle” (edition?, p 185).
As you know from my experience with Cool Runnings, I am a breast cancer
survivor and experienced depression after my last chemotherapy treatment. I
have a distinct memory of avoiding mirrors because staring back at me was a
ninety-four pound woman who was balder than bald and sicker than sick who had a
greenish tint to her skin. I tried to help the image I saw in the mirror by
wearing hats and earrings and outlandish socks and slowly, little by little, as
the days and weeks crept by, I noticed my hair starting to grow back. A hundred
and seventeen days after the last chemo, I woke up and looked at myself
in a mirror. My hair was about one-sixteenth of an inch long. I felt brave
enough to go out in public without a hat. After I went to my oncology
appointment, I still felt enough energy to shop at Costco. Wouldn’t you know
it, my membership had expired and I had to have a new photo taken, which
actually is wonderful because I have a memory of that first day out! A couple
of months later I wrote: “Today is my six-month anniversary since my last
chemo. Every time I look in the mirror I have to smile. I have about an inch of
dark, curly hair. There is no white, no gray. It is not bristly and straight
like my old hair but soft, thick, and wavy. I look younger. I smile again in
the mirror. At least there’s one positive to this hair trauma after all. I’ve
gone from straight to bald to curly.” As soon as I was able to enjoy my
reflection in the mirror, the depression began to lift. I didn’t know it then,
but I was probably smiling at more people who were smiling back at me.
I’ve learned to listen attentively to how a person
responds to “How are you?” I look directly and with intent. Most people use
“How are you” as part of a polite way to say “Hello” and move on. Because of my
cancer experiences, I want others to know I really care about how they are. If
after I ask a person how she is, she answers “O.K.” I follow up, “Just O.K.?”
In almost every case the person will stop, look at me, and think for a moment,
as if they haven’t thought about how they are or perhaps it’s when they sense
the question is sincere, they tell me how they really are and why. It’s been
wonderful to share with friends and acquaintances on a deeper level. My mother
has an endearing saying. When she asks me how I am, if I do the colloquial and
say, “Good,” she says, “I know you’re good, but how are you?” I’ve also found
when someone realizes I’m not trying to quickly pass by them but am willing to
spend time with them, I have had opportunity to listen carefully for clues
about how they really are. I’ve also learned to watch for facial expressions
that tell me sometimes more about how they are feeling than the words they are
using.
According the Dr. Ekman, there are 10,000 different
facial expressions possible, but in a typical conversation you will only see
about one hundred. If you are like me when you take the online test, you’ll
discover that even identifying sad, angry, disgust, contempt, surprise, fear,
and happy—the basic seven—is difficult. Dr. Ekman says the technology is not
far off when a computer will be able to read a face and produce a print out to
reveal what the person’s true feelings are, not why, however. The computer will
detect which muscles relax and which tense up revealing whether the person is
lying, angry, guilty, suspicious, etc, etc, etc. With this technology, the lie
detectors of the today will be as outmoded as the telegraph.
Dr. Ekman and a colleague,
Wallace V. Friesen, began an experiment and in the process realized that
“information on our faces is not just a signal of what is going on inside our
minds. In a certain sense, it is what
is going on inside our minds” (Malcolm Gladwell, Blink, 206).
Ekman and Friesen
found this out for themselves as they sat across from each other and made
different facial expression of anger and distress, day after day for weeks.
Finally one of them told the other he was feeling terrible. The other said he
hadn’t been feeling very well himself. Then they began monitoring their bodies
while making different facial expressions. “What we discovered is that the
expression alone is sufficient to create marked changes in the autonomic
nervous system” (Gladwell, 206). They were amazed because they thought they
were just making faces while they were actually making themselves sad and
depressed. When they made a particular face, they generated anger within
themselves. Their heart rates went up and their hands got hot, and they found
that it was very hard to disconnect from the emotions they were feeling and
experiencing. Ekman said, “It’s very unpleasant, very unpleasant” (Gladwell,
207). An article at www.happiness-project.com on myths about how
to achieve happiness presents a startling finding. According to a recent
experiment, “People who use Botox are less prone to anger, because they can’t
make angry faces.” Wow! The evidence is mounting: a happy face helps you feel
happier.
I remember reading an article about Dr. John Gottman who
after sixteen years of study learned to tell which couples would divorce and
which would stay together with about ninety percent accuracy after watching
them argue for five minutes. He studied over three thousand couples and had
them “converse” about a hot topic in their relationship. Then second by second
he reviewed the video of the conversations, which usually turned argumentative,
and identified twenty categories of facial expressions. He found that where the
facial expression of disdain showed for even the fleetest second in either
spouse, there was almost no hope that the marriage would survive. Even when the
couple joked and acted like they were in love, by observing those brief
microseconds, their true inner feelings were displayed.
The anatomy of facial expressions is a widely researched
topic. At www.CIO.com,
there is a test to find out how good you are at reading facial expressions. In
the test, an expression—sad, angry, disgust, contempt, surprise, fear, happy—is
flashed on a face for only a millisecond and from that briefest of exposure,
you are asked to identify the emotion on the face. Dr. Ekman developed this
interactive test called The Micro Expression Training Tool. I have taken it
several times and some expressions were hard for me to see quickly enough. Most
everyone could get every answer correct if the expression stayed on the face
longer, but that’s not real life. Expressions come and go in an instant and
hidden emotions can be identified in fleeting facial expressions. If we can
learn to accurately read these emotions, we will know what is going on inside
other persons’ brains. “Edgar Allan Poe had an intuitive grasp of this
principle. He wrote: ‘When I wish to find out how good or how wicked anyone is,
or what are his thoughts at the moment, I fashion the expression of my face, as
accurately as possible. In accordance with the expression of his, and then wait
to see what thought or sentiments arise in my own mind or heart, as if to match
or correspond with the expression’” (Goleman 19).
If you have a dour expression, you get frowns in return,
which will make you feel less loved, less attractive, less like the world is a
good and happy place. Your sour expression will in turn come back to you and
that’s exactly what you will feel—dour and sour. These implications have a
far-reaching dark side into the people we choose to be around and the media in
which we choose to participate. Dr. Iaconboni said: “I believe we should be more careful about what we watch. This is
a tricky argument, of course, because it forces us to reconsider our long
cherished ideas about free will and may potentially have repercussions on free
speech. There is convincing behavioral evidence linking media violence with imitative violence. Mirror neurons provide a plausible neurobiological mechanism that
explains why being exposed to media violence leads to imitative violence” (Scientific American, July 1, 2008). Dr.
Iacanboni told Alan Alda in The Human
Spark series that mirror neurons allow “me to get into your mind.” This
likely explains how pornography works. Whatever you watch, it is as if you were
doing it yourself. This truth has been available to us for
centuries. Proverbs 23:7 read: “For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he.”
As you improve your ability to read faces, you have
better day to day interactions with family, friends, co-workers, and strangers.
It could help you know whether or not to invest with the Bernie Madoffs of the
world or join the research group of someone such as Jan Hendrick Schön.
However, as important as being able to read others faces is, this is not about
others’ facial expressions. It’s about your face, the face you see in the
mirror, the face others see millions of times more than you do. But it’s really
not about your face because your face and the expressions reflected on it are
nothing more than a printout of what your inner core knows, feels, thinks, and
desires. Your face is the mirror to your soul. If you don’t like everything Dr.
Ekman could read in your face, you can make fundamental changes in your heart
and mind which will be reflected on your face. One of these basic changes can
happen as you allow your propensity to be happy override any prejudice in
culture, gender, religion, politics, or any other preset labels. I had another
experience in the museum.
A man in his late thirties began to ask me questions. I could
tell from his eastern European accent that English was not his first language.
I asked where he was from. “Montreal, Canada,” was his answer. He asked me more
questions; several times I had to ask him to repeat because of his heavy
accent. I asked him again where he was from. Then he said: “I might as well
tell you the truth. I am from Turkey and I’m Muslim. Are you afraid of me?”
“Why would I be afraid of you?” I asked. “Because of 9/11,” he answered. Then a
most interesting conversation developed. He told me that since September 9,
2001, people, not only strangers but people he had known for years, started
treating him differently. I told him I had no experience to think anything of
the fact that he was a Turkish Muslim; I did not think terrorist. My brain did
not label him anything other than a visitor asking me questions, which allowed
my “happy face advantage” to work. Thinking back to my previous example of the
two women in the museum on the day I had a toothache, they put a negative,
prejudiced label on me and allowed this to override their happy face advantage.
An up and coming young business executive told me of a
year he spent in a difficult job which was compounded by his marriage hitting a
wall. “How did you get through it?” I asked. His answer amazed me. He told me
he had heard a report on the radio about how faces reflect what’s going on
inside the person’s emotions. The report mentioned the tie between a smile and
feeling better about yourself. He decided to try it. He said during that trying
year, every time he was in the car alone, he’d think of a happy memory and
smile. Every time a troubling thought came, he’d force a smile. At first, he
said, the smile was fake, just turning up the corners of his mouth. But the
more he practiced smiling, the more genuine it felt and the better he felt
inside. As side benefits, he found he smiled more at home and at work. And
today, both his marriage and work are going better.
Hopefully, why facial expressions are so important will
be obvious. Happy faces make happy people, and happy people think well of
themselves, and happy people know how to stay out of longcuts. Happy people
nourish their agency. You are wired to be happy. Hopefully the scientific side
has made you aware of how your mirror neurons will help you achieve more
happiness. The bottom-line purpose of explaining mirror neurons is to give you
an advantage and a challenge not to override your feelings of compassion. Just
as making the faces of anger and distress caused Ekman and Friesen to feel physically
sick, smiling faces will make you feel good. It’s scientific. Cash in on the
happy face advantage with which you were born.
To
avoid longcuts:
1. Take wisdom and counsel from those who have walked
the road of life before you
2. Never believe you will be the exception to the laws
of nature
3. Know you will harvest what you sow
4. Learn the lessons of history so you won’t repeat
the same mistakes
5. Find
the power in resisting impulse, persisting, and delaying gratification
6. Develop
personal integrity and make moral decisions
7. Know
that others see things you don’t and welcome their perspectives
8. Work,
work, work
9. Make
goals, write them down, use failure avoidance, prioritize, avoid
procrastination
10. Value
yourself. Know you can make a difference. Do good to feel good
11. Develop
a happy inner core.
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