- Posts tagged mirror neurons
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Defining the Self
You are a conscious mind - you're a self - aware of your own mind, and probably aware of other minds as well.
Underlying that construction of consciousness is a fascinating entanglement of biology and culture, which I'm slowly becoming aware of. For years I've gone around blithely thinking that I am me. It looks like it's a little more complicated than that:
- The fascinating books, Phantoms in the Brain (if you haven't read it, do) and The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, really illustrate how much of our selves is a construction of our brain, and how even recognising your mother (or rather, associating another physical human with the mental representation you have of your mother) is a construct of the brain, and one that can be disrupted. Even in the absence of serious medical conditions - self is constructed, and dependent, on brain formation - and many medical conditions illustrate how very defining parts of what we call our selves are constructs in a reasonably modular brain system.
- Steven Pinker, in The Blank Slate, presents some awesome meta study results of twins, separated twins, siblings and adopted siblings, demonstrating how much of a person's personality (his "openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion-introversion, antagonism-agreeableness, and neuroticism") is heritable. A not-insubstantial part of your personality is right there in your genes. Parents like to think they play a substantial part in the defining of a child's self. Their role, in a normal upbringing, is not that defining.
- You've probably heard of parasites that change brain behaviour: the lancet fluke that induces ants to climb up stalks of grass so as to more easily get eaten by a cow, end up in faeces, bore through a snail and back into an ant. Or toxoplasmosis, which makes infected mice and rats less afraid of cat urine, and more likely to end up as a meal, and back in a cat. It turns out that toxoplasmosis can also affect the behaviour of humans. Drugs obviously do the same thing - but the notion of that reckless adrenaline-junky simply having some parasitic infection, feels a little more fascinating.
- Mirror neurons are mind boggling, and are currently being examined as a basis of empathy, and a theory of mind. Which leads one to think of psychopaths, which may be seen as a mental disorder in which empathy is absent, which makes one think about neuroscience and justice - for if someone is mentally afflicted in such a way, are they "responsible" for their behaviour? Which leads to a great lot of thought about ethics and morality, and how many different cultures share many moral foundations instinctively (moral psychology is awesome). Mirror neurons, as part of our brain make-up, appear to go a long way to defining us and our empathy to others.
We appear to be entanglements of brain, genetics, our culture, and many more factors.
Today, as I think about other people or myself, I'm also thinking about some of these fascinating topics that contribute to our understanding of what makes our selves, our minds, and what makes us conscious of our lives and those minds around us.
An Aside
Free will is another interesting issue related to all of these topics. Here's a taster.
