Strange Contagions: Of Laughter, Jumps, Jerks, and Mirror Neurons

Laughing Jags 

Because the laughing epidemic took place in an impoverished area in East Africa and did not affect educated people, some have suggested that epidemics of this sort are limited to the ignorant and disadvantaged. Provine, an expert on the phenomenon of contagious laughter, disagrees, saying, “To consider the Tanganyikan laugh epidemic as an exotic quirk of an alien culture is to miss the broader implications of the phenomenon. Have we not all experienced a lesser form of the epidemic? Recall your own experience with ‘fits’ of nearly uncontrollable laughter (laughing ‘jags’). Innocent bystanders are also sucked into this vortex of social biology. Once initiated, laughing jags are difficult to extinguish….”2(p131)

Laughing jags are no respecter of persons. Several television newscasters have suffered laugh attacks during broadcasts. An example is three news anchors at Channel 4 News in Washington, DC, two of whom could not stop laughing as they showed a video of a lovely model falling not once but twice on the runway at a Paris high-fashion show. As they played the video again and again, they lost it and were overcome with guffaws. You can view the video clip at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/21/news-anchors-cant-stop-la_n_294206.html. As you can see, determined efforts to stop these outbursts often make them worse.

Sometimes laughing attacks are highly inappropriate, as when a television newswoman experienced a laughing attack while describing a gruesome murder committed by a man who allegedly chopped up his wife and disposed of her body parts (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009.12/17/news-anchor-cant-stop-lau_n__395778.html).

If you think you are immune to being drawn in by someone else's laughter, try keeping a straight face at some of the laughter sites on YouTube, such as http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MhI5b-wNuc.

Hysteria Up Close 

Laughter isn't the only social behavior that is contagious. Provine suggests that similar mechanisms are involved in the infectiousness of yawning and perhaps crying and coughing as well.2(p132)

I was involved in a mini-epidemic of contagious behavior as a youngster in second grade. About 15 of us eight-year-olds were rehearsing the annual Thanksgiving play that was to be performed the following week at a parent-teachers meeting. We were standing in our assigned places on the stage when one girl suddenly fell to the floor, as if she'd been shot, and toppled off the stage. Immediately several other kids, girls and boys alike, began to drop like rag dolls. Soon the stage was strewn with bodies of unconscious kids. It was sickening; many were moaning from bloody head contusions and abrasions suffered in their collapse. Only a handful of us remained upright. The two teachers in charge were frantic. The school principal telephoned the local general practitioner, who came immediately. To this day I recall his arrival. He exuded confidence and calm. He sniffed the room for “bad air,” then made a few passes with his stethoscope over some of my limp classmates. This seemed to do the trick. All the bodies gradually began to stir and eventually perked up. The doctor told the school principal he would “make some tests,” but that he was certain everyone was going to be fine. He calmed the teachers and bandaged a few heads before leaving. I could not imagine what had caused this calamity, and I was as scared as any of my classmates. I knew they weren't faking it; many of them had huge goose eggs on their foreheads to prove it.

I didn't know it at the time, of course, but this incident was a classic example of behavioral contagion. As Provine notes, “Stressful conditions such as anxiety, heat, sleep deprivation, or strange smells often set the stage for the mass reaction.”2(p133)

Our venerated GP didn't bother with this explanation, however. He knew the teachers, principal, and worried parents were in no mood for a diagnosis of hysteria. He simply told everyone that the situation was not serious and that they should not worry. School was dismissed for the day, which allowed the concerned parents to take their children home and fuss over them. It all ended well. And yes, the play came off without a hitch.

Strange Behaviors 

Secluded groups of individuals are particularly susceptible to contagious behaviors. One of the more bizarre epidemics on record took place in the 15th century in a large French convent when a nun started mewing like a cat. This triggered a chorus of contagious mewing that infected the rest of the sisters. The nuns began gathering daily for several hours of communal mewing. When the police threatened to whip those who continued this display, the mewing stopped.2(p132)

Then there is the outbreak of biting among nuns in 15th-century Germany. When one nun started biting her sisters, an epidemic of biting ensued, involving all the nuns in the convent. The practice was highly contagious, spreading to other convents in Germany and Holland, across the Alps into Italy, and eventually to the mother convent in Rome.7

Fatal Hysteria 

No one died in the 1962 laughter outbreak in East Africa, but history is peppered with examples of contagious behaviors that were often lethal. Famous among them are epidemics of convulsive dancing during the European Middle Ages. During the 11th century, outbreaks of raving, jumping, dancing, and convulsions occurred in Germany and Italy, involving mostly women and children. In 1237, a jumping disease afflicted a hundred children at Erfurt in central Germany, many of whom died from their exertions. Similar epidemics continued periodically for centuries. They were often attributed to diabolical possession, as people danced and jumped—while raving madly for hours—until they collapsed from exhaustion.7

Another example of contagious dancing is the tarantella, an Italian dance craze believed to be caused by a spider's bite. The victim who had collapsed or was convulsing from the presumed spider bite would begin to dance if appropriate music was played. The music was considered an antidote to the spider bite. As the German physician Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker (1795-1850) describes in his work The Epidemics of the Middle Ages, “A convulsion infuriated the human frame…. Entire communities of people would join hands, dance, leap, scream, and shake for hours…. Music appeared to be the only means of combating the strange epidemic….”8, 9

Possession 

When eccentric behaviors spread in a culture that is fixated on religion, evil, and the devil, the results can be tragic. In 1634, arguably the most famous case of mass hysteria in history took place. It masqueraded as demonic possession and involved an entire convent of Ursuline nuns in the small town of Loudun, France. This appalling event is the subject of author Aldous Huxley's masterwork The Devils of Loudun.10

The nuns were believed to be overtaken by demons that had been loosed upon them when Father Urbain Grandier, the controversial local priest, tossed a bouquet of roses over the convent walls. The sisters would hold their breath, convulse, speak in tongues, bark, scream, shriek, blaspheme, and describe sexual and vulgar dreams. They were excellent contortionists. As one observer wrote, “[The nuns] struck their chests and backs with their heads, as if they had their necks broken, and with inconceivable rapidity; they twisted their arms at the joints of the shoulder, the elbow, or the wrist, two or three times around. Lying on their stomachs, they joined the palms of their hands to the soles of their feet; their faces became so frightful one could not bear to look at them; their eyes remained open without winking. Their tongues issued suddenly from their mouths, horribly swollen, black, hard, and covered with pimples, and yet while in this state they spoke distinctly. They threw themselves back till their heads touched their feet, and walked in this position with wonderful rapidity, and for a long time. They uttered cries so horrible and so loud that nothing like it was ever heard before. They made use of expressions so indecent as to shame the most debauched of men, while their acts, both in exposing themselves and inviting lewd behavior from those present would have astonished the inmates of the lowest brothels in the country.”11 No one had seen anything like it. As word spread, people came from as far away as England to have a look. Soon the nuns were a tourist attraction, which proved financially rewarding to the convent.

Grandier, a handsome man of wealth and high education, had many faults and therefore many enemies. It was known throughout Loudun that he had been “careless in his way of living,” including sexual relations with several local women.7 Jeanne des Agnes, the mother superior, swore that two demons in particular had been sent by Grandier, named Asmodeus and Zabulon. Several of Grandier's adversaries reviled him. They introduced in court two pacts that allegedly had been signed between him and the Devil and the other demons that possessed the Ursuline nuns. (Photographs of these documents exist. If you've ever wanted the Devil's autograph, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudun_possessions12 and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:UrbainPact.jpg.13 Or if you'd like to know what the demon Asmodeus looks like, check out his portrait in the Infernal Dictionary14 at http://www.lucifer.tw/fantasy/artist/devil/pic/plancy.pdf.)

Huxley and other historians believed the mother superior and several of her nuns had a sexual passion for Grandier, and that they turned on him when their desires were unrequited. When Cardinal Richelieu, one of the most powerful men in France, turned against Grandier, he never had a chance. He was convicted of the crimes of sorcery, evil spells, and the possessions experienced by the nuns, and was burned at the stake.

Huxley's account of the saga is one of the most compelling descriptions of behavioral contagion that exists. It is a graphic insight into the religious psyche of the Middle Ages and the concept of “justice” that went with it.

Demonic Contagion in America 

The American colonies were ready-made for the contagious behaviors that were being interpreted in Europe as demonic possession. As the historian Andrew Dickson White, the cofounder and first president of Cornell University, said:

The life of the early colonists in New England was such as to give rapid growth to the germs of the doctrine of possession brought from the mother country. Surrounded by the dark pine forests; having as their neighbours Indians, who were more than suspected of being children of Satan; harassed by wild beasts apparently sent by the powers of evil to torment the elect; with no varied literature to while away the long winter evenings; with few amusements save neighbourhood quarrels; dwelling intently on every text of Scripture which supported their gloomy theology, and adopting its most literal interpretation, it is not strange that they rapidly developed ideas regarding the darker side of nature.7

In 1688, four children in a poor family in Boston began leaping and barking like dogs or purring like cats. They complained of being pricked, pinched, and cut. Their “possession” was attributed to witchcraft perpetrated by an old Irishwoman, who was tried and executed.7 This disastrous happening heralded grimmer events to come.

America's most famous and heartrending episode of demonic possession exploded in 1692 in Salem, Massachusetts. It is impossible for us to imagine how this catastrophic affair could have unfolded without taking into account its social context. As White wrote, the event took place amid “the turmoil of a petty village where there is no intellectual activity, and where men and women find their chief substitute for it in squabbles, religious, legal, political, social, and personal.” Amid this atmosphere, overheated with the demonic imaginings of the day, several young women were believed to be bewitched. They seemed to have read the playbook of the Ursuline nuns of Loudun. During their bizarre trial, the courtroom resounded with their shrieks, groans, prayers, and curses. Salem's citizens were aghast. Their worst fear, that the Devil was in their midst, was confirmed. No one was safe from the accusations of the young women at the center of the events. Their charges against innocent men, women, and children were so capricious that one of Salem's foremost citizens went about continually armed, keeping a horse saddled in his stable for immediate flight, perchance he be accused of involvement in witchcraft. The merest expression of disbelief in the diabolical interpretation of these happenings, or the suggestion that something had gone terribly wrong with Salem's sense of justice, was enough to send a man or woman to the gallows. By the time the affair was over, hysteria, fanaticism, cruelty, trickery, and injustice had carried the day. Nineteen people were hanged on Gallows Hill, and several more died in prison. When the brilliant theologian Cotton Mather wrote approvingly about the incident and thanked God for the triumph over Satan at Salem in his famous book Wonders of the Invisible World, he received the approbation of the President of Harvard College and of eminent theologians all over Europe and America.7

Bodily Movement and Religion 

The relationship between physical movement and religious experience is complex. Religions worldwide have believed that humans often move spontaneously when a vital connection has been made between an individual and God, when “the spirit enters.” There are medical as well as religious implications of this idea. Shamans throughout history have used bodily movement to bring about healing, as cultural anthropologist Bradford Keeney shows in his fascinating book Shaking Medicine.15

When large groups of individuals who are engaged in worship begin to move in exaggerated ways, or when, as we've seen, these movements are accompanied by behaviors such as barking, mewing, shrieking, jumping, biting, or convulsing, are they being moved by God's spirit or by some mysterious life force? Or have they fallen prey to contagious behavior, such as the laughter epidemic we examined? Or could they be intentionally faking it, as some of the bewitched, convulsing young women at Salem seemed to be doing?

It would be condescending, judgmental, and wrong to dismiss all exaggerated bodily movement as bogus. Consider the experience of Kenneth Cohen, author of The Way of Qigong: The Art and Science of Chinese Energy Healing.16 Cohen relates an experience he had during a ceremony with Bradford Keeney, author of Shaking Medicine:

I had a personal experience of Brad's shaking power…. He placed one of his hands on my upper back and the other opposite on my upper chest. He began to shake vigorously, and apparently involuntarily, throughout his entire body. His face, shoulders, torso, and feet were vibrating with some invisible power, like a wave that was continuously cresting in his body and crashing and rippling in his fingertips. I felt the trembling power pass through me…. . While receiving this beautiful ‘gift,' I was transported to the Kalahari. I saw the tribal people with whom he had danced; I viewed their villages and landscape. I was in Africa as truly as if I had opened my eyes and found myself physically there.17

Cane Ridge 

In 1801, a series of historic religious meetings took place in Cane Ridge, Kentucky, an area originally named by Daniel Boone. These huge camp meetings involved evangelical Protestants and drew crowds of several thousand individuals. Cane Ridge had a lasting influence and is considered a landmark event in the Second Great Awakening (1790-1840), a 50-year period of great religious revival in America.

Peter Cartwright, a young itinerant Methodist minister, was one of the main Cane Ridge preachers. Cartwright left a vivid description of “the jerks,” which many worshipers would experience.18 In his autobiography, he relates:

[S]ome of our members ran wild, and indulged in some extravagancies that were hard to control…. [A] new exercise broke out among us, called the jerks, which was overwhelming in its effects upon the bodies and minds of the people. No matter whether they were saints or sinners, they would be taken under a warm song or sermon, and seized with a convulsive jerking all over, which they could not by any possibility avoid, and the more they resisted the more they jerked. If they would not strive against it and pray in good earnest, the jerking would usually abate. I have seen more than five hundred persons jerking at one time in my large congregations. Most usually persons taken with the jerks, to obtain relief, as they said, would rise up and dance. Some would run, but could not get away. Some would resist; on such the jerks were generally very severe…. To see those proud young gentlemen and young ladies, dressed in their silks, jewelry, and prunella, from top to toe, take the jerks would often excite my risibilities. The first jerk or so, you would see their fine bonnets, caps, and combs fly; and so sudden would be the jerking of the head that their long loose hair would crack almost as loud as a wagoner's whip.18

Cartwright shrewdly reasoned that some of the jerks were more genuine than others. “There is no doubt in my mind,” he said, “that, with weak-minded, ignorant, and superstitious persons, there was a great deal of sympathetic feeling with many that claimed to be under the influence of this jerking exercise; and yet, with many, it was perfectly involuntary.”18

Sometimes the jerks seemed to get out of hand:

There were many other strange and wild exercises into which the subjects of this revival fell; such, for instance, as what was called the running, jumping, barking exercise…. From these wild exercises, another great evil arose from the heated and wild imaginations of some. They professed to fall into trances and see visions; they would fall at meetings and sometimes at home, and lay apparently powerless and motionless for days, sometimes for a week at a time, without food or drink; and when they came to, they professed to have seen heaven and hell, to have seen God, angels, the devil and the damned; they would prophesy, and, under the pretense of Divine inspiration, predict the time of the end of the world, and the ushering in of the great millennium.18

Cartwright was withering in his criticism of those whose ecstasy led, in his opinion, to reckless revelations and prophesy, saying:

This was the most troublesome delusion of all; it made such an appeal to the ignorance, superstition, and credulity of the people, even saint as well as sinner. I watched this matter with a vigilant eye. If I opposed it, I would have to meet the clamor of the multitude; and if any one opposed it, these very visionists would single him out, and denounce the dreadful judgments of God against him. They would even set the very day that God was to burn the world…. They would prophesy, that if any one did oppose them, God would send fire down from heaven and consume him…. They would proclaim that they could heal all manner of diseases, and raise the dead…. They professed to have converse with spirits of the dead in heaven and hell, like the modern spirit rappers. Such a state of things I never saw before, and I hope in God I shall never see again…. I pondered well the whole matter in view of my responsibilities, searched the Bible for the true fulfillment of promise and prophecy, prayed to God for light and Divine aid, and proclaimed open war against these delusions.18

In addition to the fainting, convulsing, barking, speaking in tongues, and jerking, Cane Ridge had a laughing exercise. None of this was original. The Quakers had been quaking since their origin in the mid-1600s in England, where they were also known to fall, foam at the mouth, roar, and swell in their bellies.2(p134) American Quakers, however, had become considerably more sedate by the time Cane Ridge took place.

The Toronto Blessing 

The laughing Cane Ridgers would have felt right at home on January 10, 1994, at the Toronto Airport Vineyard Church near the Toronto Pearson International Airport, Ontario, Canada.19 On this occasion, enthusiastic participants said that the Holy Spirit descended on their small congregation, resulting in spontaneous, profuse, uncontrollable laughter. Eventually the laughter began to include other behaviors such as shaking, roaring like lions and making other animal sounds, swooning, and being stuck to the floor in “Holy Ghost glue.” Healings and personal transformations were reported. It was Cane Ridge all over again. These collective behaviors came to be called the “Toronto blessing.”

The blessing came during sermons by visiting minister Randy Clark of St. Louis, Missouri. He had been influenced by the ministry of Rodney Howard-Browne,20 a charismatic South African minister. Howard-Browne, who is recognized as the contemporary father of holy laughter, had broken out laughing in 1979 when he felt as if his body was on fire after being suffused with God's power. When laughter erupted during one of his sermons in Florida in 1993, Howard-Browne was lifted out of obscurity when the media got wind of the happening. Howard-Browne calls himself a “Holy Ghost bartender,” who dispenses the “new wine” of joy that makes people “drunk in the Spirit.”

The Toronto church claimed that many at their meeting “are receiving gold fillings in their teeth.”21 Not surprisingly, the church has grown enormously. The holy laughter movement has spread internationally, and events similar to the Toronto blessing—“laughing for the Lord”—have been reported in various Canadian and American cities, as well as in churches in England, Europe, and Asia.20, 22

Mirror Neurons 

The behaviors we've examined are often referred to as epidemics and contagions, implying that they are “catching.” How do laughter, jumps, and jerks spread through a population? How might we catch them?

When we say to someone, “I feel your pain,” recent discoveries suggest that we have the necessary neurological equipment to do just that. And not just pain; other emotions such as shame, embarrassment, lust, guilt, and pride may also be shared between different individuals.23

So-called “mirror neurons” are believed to mediate the sharing. These are neurons that fire both when an animal acts and when the animal observes the same action performed by another.24 Mirror neurons were discovered in the early 1990s by neuroscientists in Parma, Italy, by a team led by Giacomo Rizzolatti, while studying the part of the brain in macaque monkeys that is involved in the planning of bodily movements. The researchers observed that neurons in the F5 region of a macaque's frontal cortex became activated after he grabbed a peanut. They were astonished to see that the same area also became activated when the macaque saw a researcher grab a peanut, even though the monkey was perfectly still. “We didn't believe it,” Rizzolatti said later.25, 26 He and his team found the same effect in humans. When people witnessed another individual making hand movements and facial expressions, a part of their frontal cortex that is analogous to the F5 would activate, as if the observing individuals were making the hand movements and facial expressions themselves.

The term “empathy neurons” is being widely used to refer to mirror neurons. As University of California, Los Angeles, neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni explains, “[I]f you see me choke up, in emotional distress from striking out at home plate, mirror neurons in your brain simulate my distress. You automatically have empathy for me. You know how I feel because you literally feel what I am feeling.”27

Many researchers now believe that mirror neurons mediate the sharing of not just empathy, but are also involved in cueing, mimicry, and perhaps the acquisition of language.28

Laughter involves facial movements and expressions that are known to activate mirror neurons in the observing individual. Was mirror-neuron activity a possible mechanism underlying the contagious laughter epidemic that crippled a region in East Africa in 1962? That triggered the mimicry of mewing and biting among nuns in 16th-century Germany? That swept through Loudun's Ursuline nuns in 1634, when they began mimicking one another with all sorts of strange behaviors, to be repeated in Salem a few decades later? No one knows for certain. Indeed, some researchers have serious doubts about whether mirror neurons can explain the conscious experience of empathy or any other complex social emotion.29

Nothing But a Pack of Neurons? 

Many researchers have practically equated mirror-neuron activity with empathy and other social emotions. The implication is that when mirror neurons fire, the firing causes the felt experience of empathy, a bottom-up, brain-to-mind process. As New York Times science writer Sandra Blakeslee put it, “[Y]our mirror neurons tell you so.”27 This widespread interpretation reflects the view of Nobelist Francis Crick in his 1995 book The Astonishing Hypothesis: “‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll's Alice might have phrased it: ‘You're nothing but a pack of neurons.’”30 Or, as Marvin Minsky, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology cognitive scientist and artificial intelligence expert, put it more crudely, “The brain is just a computer made of meat.”31 Crick went further. In his subsequent book Of Molecules and Men, he wrote, “The ultimate aim of the modern movement in biology is to explain all biology in terms of physics and chemistry”32—to analyze, in other words, the meat.

According to Crick's agenda, the parent discipline of psychology is biology, and the senior discipline of biology is chemistry and physics. It sounds nifty, but there are serious problems. We should be cautious in assigning empathy and other manifestations of consciousness to physical structures in the brain, because of the inconvenient truth that no one knows how the physical brain is related to conscious experience. How do intracellular, electrochemical fluxes turn into thought and emotion? Is such a thing even possible? There simply is no obvious connection between the cellular activity of neurons and conscious experience. As the theoretical biologist and complex-systems researcher Stuart Kauffman puts it, “Nobody has the faintest idea what consciousness is…. I don't have any idea. Nor does anybody else, including the philosophers of mind.”33 Nobel neurophysiologist Roger Sperry took a similar position, saying, “Those centermost processes of the brain with which consciousness is presumably associated are simply not understood. They are so far beyond our comprehension at present that no one I know of has been able even to imagine their nature.”34 From the world of modern physics, Nobelist Eugene Wigner agreed, stating, “We have at present not even the vaguest idea how to connect the physico-chemical processes with the state of mind.”35 And as contemporary physicist Nick Herbert puts it, “Science's biggest mystery is the nature of consciousness. It is not that we possess bad or imperfect theories of human awareness; we simply have no such theories at all. About all we know about consciousness is that it has something to do with the head, rather than the foot.”36

In other words, we are profoundly in the dark about how an activated neuron is connected with empathy or any other emotion or thought. We don't even know for sure that mirror neurons send empathic messages to conscious awareness. For all we know, the neuroscientists may have it backward; that is, the felt experience of empathy may cause empathy neurons to light up, not the other way ‘round, through what Nobelist Sperry called “downward causation.” Sperry was emphatic about the importance of the action of consciousness on the physical brain. He said:

Any model or description [of the brain] that leaves out conscious forces … is bound to be sadly incomplete and unsatisfactory…. This scheme [downward causation] is one that puts mind back over matter, in a sense, not under or outside or beside it. It is a scheme that idealizes ideas and ideals over physical and chemical interactions, nerve impulse traffic, and DNA.37

The profusion of studies using functional magnetic resonance imaging to peer into the workings of the brain have had a bewitching effect on many researchers, prompting them to ignore views such as Sperry's, choosing instead to declare the brain's workings as the initiator and controller of all conscious and unconscious mental activity. For instance, the British neurobiologist Colin Blakemore, after reviewing the use of functional magnetic resonance imaging in communicating with patients in vegetative states and in probing the unconscious choices of normal individuals, concludes:

[I]ncreasingly neuroscientists are casting doubt on the significance of consciousness. They are revealing that most of what our brains do happens below the privileged arena of awareness, and that conscious states are caused by nerve cells that have already ‘made up their minds,' rather than conscious intentions which determine what our brains do.38

This is another way of saying that our neurons “tell us so.” The pretzel logic of such statements usually goes unnoticed by those who make them. If Blakemore is right, then his own neurons may well have “made up their minds” prior to his statement, in which case he is merely saying what his neurons are telling him to say. He has not arrived at his conclusion by careful deliberation and weighing of facts; he is an automaton controlled by his “pack of neurons,” as Crick put it. For that matter, why should we believe Crick, since, according to his own assertion, “free will [is] … nothing but a pack of neurons”? If he has no freedom of choice, why take his opinion seriously? In practice, of course, bottom-uppers such as Crick want to have it both ways. Everyone else may be nothing but a pack of neurons, but they are special, able to prevent their own reasoning from being dictated from below. Crick is a crick in the neck of logic.

Voodoo Death 

The neuron wars have been going on for decades. The flap over mirror neurons is only the latest skirmish in this protracted conflict.

An early battle was ignited in the 1940s when legendary Harvard physiologist Walter Cannon published a landmark paper, “Voodoo Death,” in the prestigious journal American Anthropologist.39 Cannon cited evidence from aboriginal cultures, strongly suggesting that conscious perception and perceived meaning exert downward causation on the brain and body, occasionally resulting in death. One of his cases was a Maori woman who, on learning that the fruit she had eaten came from a tabooed place, was dead within 24 hours. Cannon's report set off a firestorm of controversy that continues to this day. One critic charged that Cannon's evidence was anecdotal and therefore irrelevant.40 Another critic maintained that dehydration through “confiscation of fluids” was a cause of voodoo death, not some mind-body process. He cited two Australian cases in which the victims were saved by rehydrating them41 (and ignored cases such as Cannon's Maori woman; one cannot die within 24 hours from withholding fluids). Cannon did not deny the importance of physical factors; in fact he endorsed them, saying, “The combination of lack of food and water, anxiety, very rapid pulse and respiration, associated with a shocking experience having persistent effects, would fit well with fatal conditions reported from primitive tribes.”39 The debate is not whether physical factors are involved in voodoo deaths, but whether consciousness plays a significant role in initiating them.

I was involved in a case during my internship in which these issues surfaced. I was caring for a hospitalized African American man who was dying, but I could not determine why. Every test was normal. One of my colleagues, who had grown up in the Rio Grande Valley in the Texas-Mexico borderland, knew about the activities of curanderos and brujos firsthand. Acting on a hunch, he interviewed my dying patient and discovered that a fortune-teller had hexed him when he refused to pay her. Convinced he was doomed, he was living out her curse. My colleague and I were convinced the man's death was imminent. As a last resort, we concocted an elaborate dehexing ceremony that we secretly carried out late one night in near darkness. It frightened the poor man terribly, but it also proved utterly convincing to him. The next morning he awoke with a voracious appetite, perfectly well, and left the hospital shortly thereafter.42

Hypnosis 

No phenomenon in modern psychology presents greater challenges to the bottom-uppers than hypnosis. Reports of top-down phenomena abound, as when a hypnotized subject, when told that a penny placed on her arm is red hot, erupts in a blister, a second-degree burn. These accounts reveal that the manipulation of meaning can exert physiological changes that are unusual, to put it mildly. As Princeton University psychologist Julian Jaynes explained:

If I ask you to taste vinegar as champagne, to feel pleasure when I jab a pin in your arm, or to stare into darkness and contract the pupils of your eyes to an imagined light, … you would find these tasks difficult if not impossible. But if I first put you through the induction procedures of hypnosis you would accomplish all these things at my asking without any effort whatever.43

Hypnosis enables the body to behave in ways that defy ordinary neuronal function. If we are healthy, our neurons instruct our pupils to dilate in darkness, not contract. But under hypnotic suggestion they can abandon their usual function and operate in the opposite direction. This is a severe kink in the materialists' view that our neurons are always in charge—so severe that these events are often dismissed as due to faulty observation or downright fraud.

Many materialists regard hypnosis as the crazy aunt locked away in the attic of psychology, whom the more respectable members of the family avoid lest the insanity prove catching. Thus Jaynes observed, “Hypnosis is the black sheep of the family of problems which constitute psychology. It wanders in and out of laboratories and carnivals and clinics and village halls like an unwanted anomaly. It never seems to straighten up and resolve itself into the firmer properties of scientific theory.”43

Through the centuries, folk healers learned to use downward causation therapeutically. An example is the use of suggestion to cure warts, a technique so prevalent it has been widely accepted in modern psychology. Physician Lewis Thomas, director of research for many years at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, recognized the sensational significance of this phenomenon. Thomas acknowledged that hypnosis sets the process in motion—no one knows how—and that the process downstream is wrapped in even greater mystery. He marveled at the entire event, saying:

Some intelligence or other knows how to get rid of warts, and this is a disquieting thought. It is also a wonderful problem, in need of solving. Just think what we would know, if we had anything like a clear understanding of what goes on when a wart is hypnotized away…. Best of all, we would be finding out about a kind of superintelligence that exists in each of us, infinitely smarter and possessed of technical know-how far beyond our present understanding. It would be worth a War on Warts, a Conquest of Warts, a National Institute of Warts and All.44

Thomas was mainly interested in the cascade of physical reactions occurring in the body following hypnosis, but what of the initiating event—the suggestion, thought, belief—that preceded the subsequent physical reactions?

Another black sheep is the placebo response, one of the most prevalent top-down phenomena known. In the placebo response, what one thinks or expects a therapy to do is so troublesome that researchers spend millions of research dollars trying to rein it in. It's warts all over again. If these unruly black sheep—hypnosis, meaning, belief, suggestion, expectation—would behave themselves, life would be a lot simpler for the bottom-uppers.

Researchers in Sperry's downward-causation camp do not ignore or dismiss the actions of mirror or any other type of neuron; they simply believe the game is more complex than hard-core reductionists such as Crick realize. As the Oxford-trained philosopher Chris Carter describes the larger perspective in his penetrating book Parapsychology and the Skeptics:

It is important to stress that the lower level forces and properties, of atoms, molecules, and cells all continue to operate…. None of these causal forces have been cancelled or replaced, but they have been superseded by the properties of a higher organizational structure. According to this new view, mind and consciousness exert just as much (or even more) causal effect on the lower level structures than the lower level structures exert on them…. Sperry's model puts mind back into the driver's seat, and accordingly, perceptions, thoughts, beliefs, emotion, judgment, and so forth are recognized to have a real, not just imaginary, impact on the world.45

But even if Crick were correct, and mirror neurons do function as the sole gatekeepers and controllers of our empathic moments by “telling us so,” that is no guarantee they are functioning for the good of others or ourselves, since one can be empathic toward, say, Hitler, as exemplified by skinhead neo-Nazis, just as one can be empathic toward Gandhi, Nightingale, or Mandela. There is no morality in neurons.

Promissory Materialism 

As far as we know, neurons don't make consciousness, and mirror neurons don't make empathy. To imply that they do is to descend into what philosopher of science Sir Karl Popper called “promissory materialism.” This is the notion that one day, not so very long from now, we'll be able to give a completely physical account of consciousness. Lured by periodic advances in brain science, Popper explained satirically, “[W]e shall be talking less and less about experiences, perceptions, thoughts, beliefs, purposes and aims; and more and more about brain processes, about dispositions to behave, and about overt behavior…. When this stage has been reached, mentalist language will go out of fashion….”46 Nobel neurophysiologist Sir John Eccles agreed with Popper:

[P]romissory materialism [is] a superstition without a rational foundation. The more we discover about the brain, the more clearly do we distinguish between the brain events and the mental phenomena, and the more wonderful do both the brain events and the mental phenomena become. Promissory materialism is simply a religious belief held by dogmatic materialists … who confuse their religion with their science. It has all the features of a messianic prophecy….47

Mirror-neuron cheerleaders, take note. Empathy neurons are not empathy. Confusing the two involves the fallacies of misplaced concreteness and category mistakes—confusing the map with the territory, the menu with the meal.48, 49, 50

Parapsychology 

I've mentioned the book Parapsychology and the Skeptics by philosopher Chris Carter.45 Carter's analysis of the role of consciousness in the world is one of the most scholarly critiques to appear in recent years. With withering precision, he demolishes two of the perennial, go-to objections of critics of parapsychology—that there are no repeatable, replicated parapsychology (psi) experiments, and that psi experiments can't be valid because they conflict with the laws of nature. Carter shows that there are thousands of experiments documenting psi, with staggering odds against chance, but that it requires an open mind to recognize them. He concedes that psi is indeed incompatible with the classical, mechanical, Newtonian view of the world, but he shows that psi does not conflict with the modern, quantum-relativistic perspective. Carter's views are hardly solitary; they follow on the heels of several similar treatises that have appeared in recent years, most notably by psi skeptics Damien Broderick51 and Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer,52 and psi researchers Stephan Schwartz53 and Dean Radin.54, 55

The insertion of psi into the debate about the role of mirror and other neurons is crucial. Neurons cannot account for the operational spectrum of human consciousness as seen in psi. Although there is a growing, vibrant discussion about possible quantum-biological processes in the brain and other biological systems,56, 57, 58 as far as we know brains are local entities, in the sense that their actions are localized or confined to specific points in space, such as individual bodies, and to specific points in time, such as the present. Carter reviews the evidence that consciousness can manifest in ways that are nonlocal, ways that are unconstrained by space and time. In other words, consciousness can do things a brain and its neurons cannot do.

The data supporting psi is available for scrutiny by anyone. Unfortunately it remains rare for a scientist to familiarize himself/herself with this research. This willful avoidance often resembles a paranoid, phobic obsession. For instance, parapsychology and psi do not even appear in the index of Crick's book The Astonishing Hypothesis, in which he claims that our sense of free will, choice, intentions, emotions, and memories are nothing but neuronal activity in disguise. In my own field of interest, the role of consciousness in remote healing intentions and precognition, I have never encountered a skeptic who has read enough of the relevant experimental and clinical evidence to form a fair assessment of the field. But shutting one's eyes won't make the world go away, and ignoring data does not make it disappear.

Why the avoidance? Research documenting psi constitutes devastating evidence that the promissory materialists are off base. The evidence is abundant. It comes from many areas such as, to name only three, computer-based studies demonstrating presentiment or precognition, now replicated in numerous carefully controlled experiments by various investigators around the world; the ability of individuals to influence the output of random-event generators, even when the individual is remotely situated in space and time; and the ability of individuals to “see” events that are distant in both space and time, often in camera-like detail. Hundreds of controlled experiments attest to these abilities. If the neuronists, bottom-uppers, and promissory materialists admitted this evidence, their case for the primacy of brain stuff would disintegrate. They sense this, and this is why they pursue a scorched-earth policy of denying all evidence to the contrary, and why they generally “just say no” when confronting evidence such as that Carter and others have richly documented.52, 53, 55, 59, 60, 61, 62 Their denial must be total, for if they gave an inch and conceded the validity of a single experiment demonstrating that consciousness manifests nonlocally, their carefully defended neuronal world would collapse.

“Are Mirror Neurons Too Cool?” 

Following the discovery of mirror neurons, there has been a flurry of enthusiasm to enshrine empathy, altruism, and cooperation as biologically valuable human traits. Empathy and altruism are now “in,” after being derided for generations by hard-core evolutionary biologists who believe that selfishness and survival of the fittest are the proper metrics for understanding human evolution and behavior—Tennyson's “Nature, red in tooth and claw.”63 But now that empathy has its ambassador in the brain in the form of mirror neurons, it's OK to talk about the biological value of being nice. This turnaround is welcome, but it's a shame we had to wait so long for the tender traits to be legitimized by brain science before considering them a legitimate aspect of who we are. Better late than never.

In his essay “Are Mirror Neurons Too Cool?” science journalist Jonah Lehrer writes, “Sure, mirror neurons are overhyped, but it's not everyday that we get neuroscientific insight into everyday life.”64 But how deep are the insights? Mirror neurons appear to contribute nothing that is fundamentally new to our understanding of the essential nature of consciousness. Mirror-neuron activity is a correlate of conscious experience—a widely applicable correlate to be sure, but a correlate nonetheless—not some deeply explanatory, unifying discovery where consciousness is concerned. And because “correlation is not causation,” according to the venerable maxim from experimental science, we cannot say that mirror neurons cause empathy, just as we cannot say that our television sets cause Jay Leno or the Super Bowl game, but are correlated with them. Of course we should applaud any discovery that adds to our knowledge of how the human brain functions. But we should resist the notion that mirror neurons somehow “explain,” “make,” or “cause” empathy or any other expression of human consciousness.

Why the Hype? 

I suggest that several factors help explain the enthusiasm surrounding the discovery of mirror neurons in human brains. There is a worldwide, growing awareness that it is no longer business as usual for planet Earth and Homo sapiens. The litany of the sobering challenges we face is familiar by now to most open-minded people who prize science over polemic and politics; I will not list them here. The discovery of mirror neurons suggests that we have the biological firepower to meet these challenges, because we are geared to care and empathize with one another and the world and its creatures. A caring species is more likely to survive because it cares. Just when we thought we are little more than a skin-encapsulated collection of selfish genes, we have stumbled onto the discovery that we are built to be nice. The “better angels of our nature” is no longer a metaphor; the angels are there, blinking on and off in our brains, in the form of mirror neurons. No wonder there is wild excitement over these tiny brain bits. Their discovery confirms capacities we didn't know we had, or refused to acknowledge, in our macho, winner-take-all world. Everyone seems thrilled. I've seen normally unflappable Buddhists behave giddily, as if mirror neurons are the greatest discovery since the Buddha's Four Noble Truths. The excitement goes beyond the usual gee-whizz reaction when ingenious scientific discoveries are announced, because mirror neurons are about more than science. They are about the virtues of compassion and the promise of human survival, and that's why they're cool.

Homo Empathicus 

Mirror neurons were unknown at the time of the contagious behaviors we have examined. Future research will no doubt clarify their role in emulation, cueing, and mimicry, and whether they are involved in various social contagions. If empathy does turn out to catalyze infectious emotions, perhaps we will come to regard those laughing Tanganyikans, mewing nuns, and jerking Cane Ridgers as harbingers of the empathic capacity that is required if we are to save our own skins.

In his important book The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis, author Jeremy Rifkin compellingly shows that empathy offers our best hope for survival as an endangered species.25 He says, “A radical new view of human nature has been slowly emerging and gaining momentum, with revolutionary implications for the way we understand and organize our economic, social and environmental relations in the centuries to come. We have discovered Homo empathicus.”25(p43) Rifkin cites the discovery of mirror neurons as key evidence for this view.25(pp82-90)

I believe Rifkin is on target about the crucial role of empathy in our future. Without empathy it is difficult to imagine how we can sufficiently cherish one another and safeguard our environment, the only home we have.

At this stage of its development, the main contribution of the mirror-neuron hypothesis is that it is a partial corrective to the view that we humans are overwhelmingly selfish creatures whose sole evolutionary imperative is to survive, reproduce, and perpetuate our genes, at whatever cost to those outside our kinship group. The mirror-neuron hypothesis suggests that we are equipped for empathy, compassion, altruism, and cooperation, in addition to being biologically geared for competition, procreation, and survival.

But empathy is no guarantee of survival, and all the mirror neurons in the world cannot prevent empathy from being overwhelmed under certain conditions. Want to know what a world without empathy might look like? The Road, by author Cormac McCarthy, and the movie of the same name, reveal a savagely cruel, depraved, dying world in which all plants and nearly all animal life have perished because of an unspecified cataclysmic event.65 Civilization has descended into a bestial, dog-eat-dog, cannibalistic state where empathy and altruism have been extinguished, but not quite; a tattered remnant of kindness remains. McCarthy shows that empathy is not enough, however. Human life is doomed; it is only a matter of time.

An Empathy Manifesto 

On Monday, March 4, 1861, Abraham Lincoln took the oath of office as President of the United States and delivered his first inaugural address. The situation was grim. Jefferson Davis had been inaugurated as the President of the Confederacy two weeks earlier. Things were so tense that Lincoln had arrived in Washington by a secret route to avoid danger. General Winfield Scott's soldiers guarded his movements.66

I have often thought that Lincoln's magnificent words, which were meant to heal broken bonds between North and South, can be applied in a broader context. Lincoln tried to heal political disunion. Today we face a more fundamental kind of disunion, in which we have gradually seceded from a sustainable relationship with the natural world. This rupture cannot endure without horrible consequences. The concluding words that Lincoln spoke to his fellow citizens from the East Portico of the Capitol, we might contritely speak to the greater world that sustains us. We might call it an Empathy Manifesto:

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory…will yet swell…when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.67

We are involved in a race toward fully realizing the empathic consciousness that is necessary for our survival. Time is not on our side. So blink and twinkle, you empathy neurons, blink for all you're worth!