Simulating Other Selves
Emotions and pain so readily spread between people that researchers describe them as “contagious”. The automatic sharing of emotional state (affect) happens all the time without our knowing. However, sometimes we notice that we are sharing how others are feeling and when this happens social neuroscientists call it somatic empathy: “experiencing what other people feel while being aware that this vicarious state is produced by someone else”. Research in social perception has only just begun to uncover the mechanisms involved.
It starts with the need for survival.
Unconsciously, we scan our surroundings for opportunities and danger, rapidly assessing other people as friend or foe. We know that this unconscious scanning happens because our body responds. For example, when researchers flash images of angry faces past people so quickly that they do not register seeing them (subliminal exposure), their body nonetheless has a fear response. For obvious reasons, danger is important. However, our unconscious is also good at spotting potential opportunities. In fact, we unconsciously scan and respond to anything that our intention is set upon. If you are playing a game of counting red cars, this unconscious scanner will seek out red cars and then turn your head towards them until you ‘see’ them. You will feel as if you have been guided towards what you seek. Cognitive scientists think this primal intelligence evolved to help us predict, without conscious effort, what others are going to do—an essential survival skill.
Cognitive scientist, Antonio Damasio, explains in his book, The Feeling of What Happens, that at a fundamental level we feel our world; we feel what is happening and what is going to happen. This, he explains, precedes all other layers of cognition (mental processing). He summarises our primal intelligence as “feel first, then think” or as Bessel van der volk famously puts it, “the brain narrates what the body knows.” As comprehension of the world is felt in the body and we need to rapidly assess others, we find an incredibly astute ability to read other people (and, incidentally, other animals) via sensations in our own body.
How we know what is happening around us depends on us being able to recognise meaning from sensory input. Recognising that a robot appears to be ‘crying’ or that a cartoon character has been hurt, involves feeling what appears to be going on as if happening to us. We don’t comprehend the meaning of the word “grasp” without drawing on the sensation of “grasping” with our hand muscles. We don’t feel sorry for someone who is in pain without also feeling a simulation of their pain in our own body. This information is useful even though mostly beneath conscious awareness.
As sensory signals from other people reach our central nervous system, they are enacted via a range of Perception-Action Mechanisms (PAMs). Until 2013, it was assumed that specialised “mirror neurons” explained how perception turned into action in the body but nowadays it is understood that we use everyday motor neurons vicariously (i.e. via indirect experience) to form simulations of what is going on for others. Simulations make use of broad networks throughout the brain; regions for movement, sensing, emotions, and physiological reactivity, activate vicariously, enabling us to feel in our own body—in 3D—how it would feel to be that person right now.
When, for example, we see a facial expression, neurons in several brain regions vicariously activate facial muscles, corresponding emotions, and physical sensations, which not only produce facial mimicry but also enable us to experience an estimation of that person’s emotional experience. From simple mirroring of body posture and gestures to complex sensorimotor simulations, we infer others’ states by reference to our own experience. Because embodied simulations of others enable us to understand how they feel and what they are likely to do next, the label “somatic empathy” is justified.
Social neuroscientists have discovered that our brains become ‘coupled’ when we are trying to understand each other. This is not a simple one to one synchronisation but a coupling of mental processing that enables shared perception, shared perspective and shared intention. Researchers propose that our brains can work in either solo-mode or network-mode.
Brain coupling takes place between teacher and student, performer and audience, team players, musicians, therapists and clients and can help explain experiences in which we feel we are working in a merged space, a connected space where two have become one. In psychotherapy, there is an awareness of working in an “intersubjective space” that is not only psychological but embodied [for more details see, Talking Bodies: A New Vision of Psychoanalytic Theory, Practice and Supervision by Brothers and Sletvold.]
Although sights and smells can elicit automatic imitation of other’s actions, emotional contagion and pain contagion, it is also possible to feel with others who are not nearby. We can feel somatic empathy via zoom calls in which we have sights and sounds but no odours or energy fields. We can share the emotions of robots or the physical pain of cartoon characters when, again, there are no biofields or smells available. Studies show that thoughts, imagination and memory also elicit embodied simulations. We readily feel with fictional characters in books, films, and video games, and our brain shows a pain response even if we only think someone else is in pain.
“Combining vicarious motor, somatosensory, and emotional activations allows one empathically to get under other people’s skin” —Christian Keysers, neuroscientist of the Social Brain Lab, Netherlands.
It now looks as if we are simulating others so that we can recognise what is going on for them. Because we inevitably recognise some conditions more readily than others (due to our past experience), we are likely to be more aware of some moments of shared experience than others.
Can we only recognise something we have personally been through?
No, clearly not but we do need to have enough similar experience to recognise our embodied simulations of others. Many times, I have felt embodied simulations which I could not recognise and just felt weird sensations.
An ancient non-verbal somatosensory intelligence is at work during our modern lives. We feel our way through transient simulations of what is going on for others and as our curiosity shifts so do our embodied simulations. This provides a fundamental comprehension upon which more sophisticated levels of conscious understanding are founded.
