The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,353

has only to be exercised, or at least not repressed, for a new age to dawn. Unfortunately, Rifkin’s promise of a “leap to global empathic consciousness and in less than a generation” is based on a dodgy interpretation of the neuroscience.

In 1992 the neuroscientist Giacomo Rizzolatti and his colleagues discovered neurons in the brain of a monkey that fired both when the monkey picked up a raisin and when the monkey watched a person pick up a raisin.17 Other neurons responded to other actions, whether performed or perceived, such as touching and tearing. Though neuroscientists ordinarily can’t impale the brains of human subjects with electrodes, we have reason to believe that people have mirror neurons too: neuroimaging experiments have found areas in the parietal lobe and inferior frontal lobe that light up both when people move and when they see someone else move.18 The discovery of mirror neurons is important, though not completely unexpected: we could hardly use a verb in both the first person and the third person unless our brains were able to represent an action in the same way regardless of who performs it. But the discovery soon inflated an extraordinary bubble of hype.19 One neuroscientist claimed that mirror neurons would do for neuroscience what DNA did for biology.20 Others, aided and abetted by science journalists, have touted mirror neurons as the biological basis of language, intentionality, imitation, cultural learning, fads and fashions, sports fandom, intercessory prayer, and, of course, empathy.

A wee problem for the mirror-neuron theory is that the animals in which the neurons were discovered, rhesus macaques, are a nasty little species with no discernible trace of empathy (or imitation, to say nothing of language).21 Another problem, as we shall see, is that mirror neurons are mostly found in regions of the brain that, according to neuroimaging studies, have little to do with empathy in the sense of sympathetic concern.22 Many cognitive neuroscientists suspect that mirror neurons may have a role in mentally representing the concept of an action, though even that is disputed. Most reject the extravagant claims that they can explain uniquely human abilities, and today virtually no one equates their activity with the emotion of sympathy.23

There are, to be sure, parts of the brain, particularly the insula, which are metabolically active both when we have an unpleasant experience and when we respond to someone else having an unpleasant experience.24 The problem is that this overlap is an effect, rather than a cause, of sympathy with another’s well-being. Recall the experiment in which the insula lit up when a participant received a shock and also when he or she watched an innocent person receiving a shock. The same experiment revealed that when the shock victim had cheated the male subjects out of their money, their insulas showed no response, while the striatum and orbital cortex lit up in sweet revenge.25

Empathy, in the morally relevant sense of sympathetic concern, is not an automatic reflex of our mirror neurons. It can be turned on and off and even inverted into counterempathy, namely feeling good when someone else feels bad and vice versa. Revenge is one trigger for counterempathy, and the flipflopping response of the sports fan tells us that competition can trigger it as well. The psychologists John Lanzetta and Basil Englis glued electrodes to the faces and fingers of participants and had them play an investment game with another (bogus) participant.26 They were told either that the two were working together or that they were in competition (though the actual returns did not depend on what the other participant did). Market gains were signaled by an uptick of a counter; losses were signaled by a mild shock. When the participants thought they were cooperating, the electrodes picked up a visceral calming and a trace of a smile whenever their opposite number gained money, and a burst of sweat and the trace of a frown whenever he was shocked. When they thought they were competing with him, it went the other way: they relaxed and smiled when he suffered, and tensed up and frowned when he did well.

The problem with building a better world through empathy, in the sense of contagion, mimicry, vicarious emotion, or mirror neurons, is that it cannot be counted on to trigger the kind of empathy we want, namely sympathetic concern for others’ well-being. Sympathy is endogenous, an effect rather than a cause of how people relate to one another. Depending on how beholders conceive of a relationship, their response to