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On Mirror Neurons, Compassion, and Reality

by John Light

Mirror neurons are the progeny of neuroscience

What are mirror neurons?

Mirror neurons have been written about extensively in the popular press, and they have been interpreted as a source of connection between people.  Subject A watches subject B perform a common activity while researchers observe neural circuits in the brains of both.  They find that similar circuits are active in both the watcher and the watched.

This replication of neural circuit activity has been described as subject A’s neurons mirroring subject B’s neurons.  Mirror neurons are the subset of subject A’s neurons (about 10%) that show this behavior.

The behavior has been reproduced in other studies.  The first studies were done with electrodes attached to neurons in Macaque monkey brains, and the results have been replicated using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).  Positive but weak confirmation in humans have followed, and some results show mirroring between humans and monkeys.

With the encouragement of some researchers, the popular scientific press hailed the results as evidence of a biological basis for empathy and empathic connections between living beings generally.

Buddhists and others who appreciate the relations of sentient beings were especially attracted to the discovery.  It implied that there is a biological basis for how we feel about other humans and other species.

Cause and effect

Replicating the studies that found them was difficult.  Studying them initially required invasive, very low resolution connections into monkey brain tissue, which could not be done with humans at all.  Early fMRI experiments were even more limited on spatial resolution and required subjects to endure the noisy enclosed environment of an MRI machine.  All the studies required making questionable judgements about low resolution images.

The fundamental issue was that the researchers confounded cause and effect.  If subject A exhibits neural behavior because of what subject B is doing, then subject B must be the cause and subject A the effect.  Any other result would be silly, as if subject A is predicting what subject B will do, and the existence of pervasive prediction would turn neuroscience upside down.  To avoid upsetting settled science they invented mirror neurons.

Neuroscience turned upside down

A closer look at reality

In the early years of the 21st century, Karl Friston figured out the world doesn’t work the way neuroscientists thought.  There was no one more qualified to make such a determination.  He is the world’s most cited neuroscientist, working out of University College London on how fMRI machines work, and fMRI provides our best understanding of the brain.

He discovered a fundamental description of how all brains work, called The Free Energy Principle of the Brain.  I consider it to be on the same level as Einstein’s theory of General Relativity, and I don’t fully understand it.  I will attempt to interpret it here because it is the first explanation of the brain that is fully compatible with the Buddha’s teachings.

The older view of the brain

The older view of the brain is still prevalent, and it colors every aspect of human life, from psychology to sociology to criminology to politics.

The older view is of humans as machines, consisting of sensors, processing, and actuators. The sensors are the five external senses supplying input to the brain.  Processing is an intermediate stage of thinking and deciding and choosing.  Actuators are muscular activities that affect the world outside our bodies.  This can be thought of as the input-process-output (IPO) model of the brain.

The IPO model has never worked very well.  First, it fails to explain behavior when everything is going right,  Second, it is exceptionally bad at explaining behavior when things go wrong in our lives.

When things go right

When things go right, we behave at speeds that are incompatible with the IPO model.  We know sensations, processing, and activation take considerable time, and the IPO model fails to explain how we dance, play games, hold conversations, read fast, and continuously act in the moment, with ongoing half- to one-second delays in our neural pathways.

To explain our everyday behavior, psychologists invented “fudge factors” such as “priming” and “cueing” that suggest that the brain cheats to accomplish normal life.  They even whispered the work “prediction” shamefully, since they saw no mechanism for it.

When things go wrong

When things go wrong, we behave irrationally, according to the presumed logic of the brain.  Response to stress and mental illness is not explainable in the IPO model because reality shows we continually act in ways that are not in our best interest.

We report sensations that have no apparent biological basis.  We feel sad and depressed with no experiential reason.  We experience hallucinations and delusions that are seen as broken processing.  We act out in destructive and self-destructing ways.

The wrong model

The IPO model doesn’t really work, whether a being’s life appears to be working or not.  It doesn’t work for humans or any other creature, except perhaps for the simplest creatures under our feet or in the ocean slime.

A new view of all brains

Brains continually predict the future

All brains predict what their sensations will be in the 0.5-1.0 seconds.  They do this so they can act in the present moment.  If they didn’t predict, we would be acting 0.5-1.0 seconds later, and the present moment would be lost to us.

To understand what this means, we have to take a larger view of what happens in the brain and body.  The IPO view concerns itself primarily with what happens to the conventional senses of the peripheral nervous system (PNS): sight, hearing, touch, olfaction.  The predictive view depends on recognizing the importance of our interior senses, mediated by the autonomic nervous system (ANS).  The ANS senses and modulates the internal functions of the body.

The purpose of the brain is to maintain homeostasis of the body that contains it.  Homeostasis is the state of steady internal physical and chemical conditions maintained by all living systems.  External events are often a threat to homeostasis, so the brain must manage both internal and external events.  For a more complete explanation of homeostasis, see Homeostasis – Wikipedia.

A brain that successfully predicts the future, even by a second, will be more successful than one that doesn’t.  This is enforced by every other living thing we encounter.

How does the predictive brain work?

The brain resides within what is called a Markov blanket, separated from reality by layers of relatively slow neural connections, yet it must compete in reality.  It acts much like a scientist, making testable predictions about what the senses will sense.  These predictions are based on its unique model of reality.

The model our brains work with is nothing like computer models.  We really don’t know what it consists of, and it likely consists of communities of smaller models.  The model(s) generates predictions of what the senses will sense a half second or so in the future, and they project the predictions downward through the respective sensory cortex regions of the brain, which project processed predictions to the thalamus.

Downward predictions meet upward sensory information in the thalamus a dozen or so milliseconds after the external events occur, since the thalamus is the first stop in the brain for almost every sensory signal. The sensory signals are compared to the predictions, and our reactions and behaviors proceed from that comparison.

The thalamus also forwards the sensory signals to the first layers of the respective sensory cortex regions, where the mismatches are quantified into error signals.  The error signals are processed during their ascent to where the modeling is done.  The processed error signals are then used to improve the brain’s model of reality.

Implications of the predictive brain

• Our model of the world is often wrong.
• Our predictions are often wrong, but close.
• Our predictions are good enough for survival.
• Practice and repetition make our predictions better.
• Well-practiced activities can be performed with no latency.
• Memories are of our model of the world, not the reality of the world.
• Our model is based on related memories modulated by current sensory input

How did the world get this way?

Early animals likely used the IPO model for their brains, but once some new species evolved simple prediction, the new species easily outcompeted the others and a prediction arms race ensued.  Now every animal predicts, and prediction is a major target of evolution.

Once a species can predict successfully most of the time, it can drive its behavior latency to zero, regardless of processing time, and then processing power (cognition) can grow without slowing it down.  That is what makes humans so successful.  Other animals like big cats and antelope have also driven their latency to zero, but they haven’t expanded their cognition as much as we have.

How does this affect the concept of mirror neurons?

What the researchers found when subject A was looking at subject B acting was that subject A was predicting what subject B would do.  Subject A wasn’t mirroring subject B; subject A was predicting what would happen.

The neural signals were the same in either way of looking at the situation, but the timing would be different.  The researcher didn’t have good enough timing measurements to tell the difference, so they told the story that didn’t involve an improbable prediction.

How does a predictive brain relate to Buddhism?

An introduction to the Buddha’s teaching

The origin of suffering

A brief view of how life works.

• We learn from an early age that there is a world outside of us.
• We learn how the world will respond to us.
• We develop strategies and tactics for getting what we need.
• For each strategy and tactic we remember how the world responded.
• Each moment of life we have expectations based on our memories.
• We live our lives proceeding from one expectation to another.
• Our expectations are often not met.
• We take actions that we believe will make life better.
• Our actions will often disappoint us, yet we may learn from them.
• We keep trying to understand the world.

I believe this list applies to everyone, including those who have experienced trauma and neglect and those who suffer from mental difficulties.  We are all frustrated with life, which the Buddha referred to as suffering.

The cause of suffering

Above, the first item is 

• We learn from an early age that there is a world outside of us.

The rest follow from the first.

We figure out early on that suffering results from causes and conditions of the world outside of us, and one of the first remedies we apply is to separate ourselves from that world so we can act independently.  That world is reality, so separation from it results in ignorance.

I like this description from Lion’s Roar:

The cause of suffering is fundamental ignorance or misunderstanding about our own nature and the nature of reality. We suffer because of our mistaken belief that things, including us, are separate, independent, and solid.

We don’t separate ourselves from reality because of willfulness or laziness. It is our nature as human beings to do so.  The warm Markov blanket that surrounds us is constructed by our DNA during our nine months of gestation, and it is an important part of our survival equipment once we are born.

The end of suffering and the path

Buddhism assures us that we can escape suffering, and offers us a path to do so.

The Predictive Brain in Normal Life

The role of attention

Our attention is an outgoing process, directed by the attention centers of the brain.  Most of the time we only sense what we attend to.  This is especially true of the eyes, but is also true of hearing and touch.

The eyes usually only see what is in the very center of our vision, the high-resolution fovea.  You can see how small that is by holding your thumb at arm’s length.  What you can see in both high-resolution and full-color is only the size of your thumbnail.  Notice how much of your visual field is not contained in that small region.

In order to see the rest of the world, your eyes must dart around unconsciously in a process called a saccade, while our attention also turns the head as needed.  It takes time for saccades to cover much territory, so we miss a lot.  We count on our attention to direct us to what we need to see, and attention depends on our model of reality.

While the actual sensory information is incoming, gathering enough and the right information requires the outgoing active effort of our brain.

The role of the senses

Most of our incoming (ascending) senses arrive at the thalamus (under the brain) in about ten milliseconds from when they are received. Two relevant things happen when they get there.  Other things happen that aren’t part of this story.

First, they are compared with the descending predictions.  If the sensations match the predictions, nothing much else happens.  If they don’t match, the thalamus signals the amygdala about the severity and nature of the mismatch.  The amygdala may respond by initiating a threat response, including redirecting attention and releasing stress hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline.  Again, that’s another story.

Second, the sensory information is relayed upward to the appropriate sensory cortex region.  Each sensory cortex region processes the information and reports detailed differences from the predictions as error signals to higher sensory regions for further processing.

Various levels and types of error signals are relayed upwards until they reach the limbic system that maintains the model that generates predictions.  The error signals are used to update the model to be closer to reality, allowing future predictions to be better.  In this way, our brain’s model of the world remains close to reality, lagging by about a half second.

The role of memory

The memories we hold in our brains are not memories of reality.  The memories we have are not even memories of the sensations received through the eyes, ears, skin, and nose.  They are memories of the state of our world model at the time an event is stored.

The memories we recall are filtered by attention, imperfect senses, processing of error updates, lag time, and selective recall, yet we must trust them because they are useful and our only connection to the past.

The most common use of memory is the limbic system’s continual prediction production.  During every second, the limbic system recalls dozens or hundreds of memories related to what is happening in the present moment in an attempt to generate useful predictions.

Imperfect recall of imperfect memories means that our predictions are also imperfect, yet we make decisions and act based on them.  Flawed predictions are better than none.

The role of cognition

Cognition is sort of a catch-all term for thinking, but includes the concept of talking to ourselves.

Thinking is what we believe the brain does a lot of.  We make decisions, and we make choices.  We fret.  We justify.  We rue.  We wish.  We blame.  All are based on imperfect memories.

We often hear what appears to be a narration of our life coming from somewhere inside us.  “And then I did that.”

The Predictive Brain in Meditation

What’s different in meditation?

I’ll assume a nominal meditation experience, since there are many variations.

• We sit with an intention.  We seldom do that elsewhere in our lives.
• We hold an upright posture.  Again, rare.
• We let go of what happened previously.  This is hard.
• We let go of sensory input.  We do this a lot, so easy.
• We attend to one thing, usually the breath.  A rarity in a multitasking world.
• We notice when voices arise.  We usually consume them voraciously.
• We touch the voices lightly.  We usually judge what they say.
• We let the voices go so we can return to the breath.  Usually we grasp them.
• We continue to meditate.  We seldom continue anything.

We end with appreciation.  We seldom appreciate our minds.

What’s happening in the brain during meditation?

The brain is confused.  What are we doing? Why are we doing it?  When will it end?

The disciplines of intention, posture, letting go, and attending create a break from normal life.

When the brain becomes bored, it can stop predicting.  With no predictions, all sensory input is mismatched in the thalamus and sensory cortex, so sensory error codes flood upward from them.  In spite of the name given them by the neuroscientists who discovered them, the error signals are not really errors in the sense of being right and wrong: they carry complete information about the senses upwards to the limbic system and the world model.  They can do this easily since the limbic system isn’t sending down predictions.

The flood of error codes is used to update the brain’s model, often making no changes, sometimes making large changes and filling in details that our predictive perceptions don’t notice.

• We seldom pay attention to our peripheral vision, but a meditating brain can attend to the entire visual field as it relinquishes its usual tight hold on the narrow foveal view.
• We seldom pay attention to all the sounds that impinge on our ears, but a meditating brain can hear beyond the obvious voices and sounds.
• We often don’t pay attention to our bodies, but a meditation brain notices parts of the body that are lost to us normally.
• We almost never pay attention to the insides of our bodies, but a meditating brain can notice pain and other internal sensations that are normally not available to us.

The brain in meditation learns to relax into an inward/upward sensory path, where sensations are primary, followed by processing of those sensations.  This is similar to the IPO model.  It is not a better approach than prediction; it is an additional resource that complements prediction.  It is a perceptual skill that many of us don’t have without learning it.

Back to Mirror Neurons, Compassion, and Reality

Compare neuroscience and Buddhism

So far I’ve written about neuroscience and Buddhism.  Let’s consider what they say about us and our world.  I will use our 21st century view of neuroscience.

What and where is the mind?

Buddhism concerns itself with the mind, and neuroscience concerns itself with the brain.

The Buddha lived in a time when little was known about the brain.  I’m sure physicians of his time were aware that the lump of pudding in the skull is critical to life, and everyone was probably aware that injury to the skull often resulted in behavioral deficits.  But all of the Buddha’s teaching involved our experience of the brain, then and now called the mind.

Neuroscience has settled on studying the brain.  That is not to say there aren’t other branches of science that consider the mind, most notably psychology and psychiatry.

Moreover, the relationship of mind and brain has been the center of perhaps the most contentious debates of philosophy.  Philosophers have known for centuries about the function and importance of the brain, but they haven’t agreed on its relationship to their scion, the modern mind.

Neuroscience leaves that debate to the philosophers, and concerns itself only with the brain.

Buddhism and neuroscience agree there is only one source of mental activity, though each of them has a different name for it.

What and where is the self?

Neither neuroscience nor Buddhism can identify or place a self.

This was one of the Buddha’s fundamental discoveries.  He didn’t say the self doesn’t exist; he said it is insubstantial.  Specifically, he found that it is a set of heaps, and each of the heaps is an aggregate, which is itself a collection.  I encourage you to learn about the five skandhas if you haven’t run across them before.

Neuroscience hasn’t found anything in the brain that can be called a self.  In the 20th century, there was thought that our increasing understanding of brain function would lead us to where the various concepts of psychology, such as self, are located.  A married pair of philosophers in the late 20th century projected that wouldn’t happen.

Paul and Patricia Churchland refer to the collection of everyday explanations of behavior as folk psychology.  It includes jealousy, hatred, desires, intentions, and a thousand other behavioral concepts.  They argue that all of these concepts are just handy nicknames for what is really happening in the brain and that advanced neuroscience is needed to understand what is really happening.

Shortly after the turn of this century, Karl Friston, arguably the most knowledgeable expert on the most advanced neuroscience tool (MRI), proposed a theory that does what the Churchlands predicted.  It describes the brain in terms that have nothing to do with folk psychology.

The theory, called The Free Energy Principle of the Brain, makes no mention of the self, and leaves no room for finding a unified self.

Neuroscience and Buddhism agree that there is no evidence of a substantial self.  Note I used the word “evidence”; both depend on and expect it.

Suffering is a inherent part of the human condition

This is the first of the four noble truths of Buddhism.  Buddhism doesn’t deny suffering, and doesn’t ask its followers to deny it.  In fact, Buddhism uses the truth of suffering as motivation for doing something about it.

Modern neuroscience knows where suffering resides in the body.  Suffering is mediated by the autonomic nervous system (ANS).  The autonomic nervous system touches everything inside the body.  It consists of the sympathetic nervous system (SNS), the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS), the enteric nervous system (ENS), and parts of the peripheral nervous system (PNS).  It interacts with the central nervous system (CNS) in the limbic system.

The feelings of suffering occur throughout the body, though they are often interpreted by the brain.  Changes in heart rate, breathing rate, blood pressure, skin temperature, and other ongoing bodily functions are monitored and modulated by the brain.  Ongoing conditions such as hunger, abdominal cramps and upset, bowel pain, chronic body pain, dry mouth, dry eyes, and dozens of other symptoms are also monitored by the brain.
Neuroscience calls these bodily experiences affect, and they are also what Buddhism calls suffering.  There are hundreds of bodily processes that make up a healthy body, and the brain’s job is to maintain all of them in homeostasis, which is nearly impossible, contributing to suffering.

Emotional behavior is a learned reaction to suffering

As soon as we are born, we start to learn behaviors that get us fed, keep us warm, get us held, and encourage care of all sorts.  As our needs are met, we find other sources of suffering that we want to be addressed, and this cycle of unmet needs and behavioral experimentation expands.

Those of us whose needs are not met, through either trauma or neglect, major or minor, will invent behaviors trying to induce care, as well as repeat behaviors that may have worked once in the past, usually called superstitions.

The result by the time we reach adulthood is a wide-ranging repertoire of behaviors, all of which seemed to be successful at some point, many of which are no longer useful or appropriate.  Some are then ingrained, becoming habits that have outlived their usefulness.  Unlearning is harder than learning.

Buddhism sees the essential emptiness of our behaviors: they exist but aren’t as solid as we assume.  Neuroscience recognizes that our behaviors are learned rather than inherent.  Our early crying and yelling as a child may be built into our genetics, but the variations we learn in childhood are not.

Lisa Feldman Barrett is the psychologist/neuroscientist who has upended how neuroscience views emotions.  She summarizes her research in her 2017 book How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain and her TED talk You Aren’t at the Mercy of Your Emotions.  She discovered the disconnect between affect and emotional behavior.
Both neuroscience and Buddhism support letting go of destructive behaviors, recognizing that they are essentially a reflection of the underlying affect and suffering .  Buddhism provides the path of meditation to accomplish the letting go.  Psychology is making progress on therapies that recognize and deal with this connection.

A reflection on Mirror Neurons

The rise and fall of a faddish belief

When mirror neurons were first announced, there was a lot of publicity about them.  People seemed to like the idea and wanted more information, which encouraged more publicity, if not more research.

I can only understand their popularity by considering the possibility that their existence met an important human need.

They have remained controversial ever since they were announced, and subsequent studies have been mixed, and there are few of them.

Now the free-energy principle of the brain can explain them.  What were seen as mirror neurons are really predictive neurons, the outcome the researchers couldn’t imagine. The 4-10% of neurons that were thought to be mirroring are indeed part of the same circuits we use to do the same actions ourselves, but they are a small part of the predictions we are making about the world all the time.

If you search the web for “mirror neurons” you can see remnants of the decaying controversy.  What you don’t see yet is the replacement argument now that we have a better idea what is happening.

Why did we want to believe in mirror neurons?

Many people and articles expressed the belief that mirror neurons were the source of empathy.  Many of us desperately want to believe there is a natural connection between people, and in many cases that desire extends to natural connections among all life.

If each of us is reflecting the lives of others, then we might have an easy explanation of our connection.  Many articles about mirror neurons used the word ‘empathy’, and some even used the word ‘compassion’. If those were built into our genes we could maintain hope that there are easy ways to attain them.

What’s really going on?

Instead of mirroring, those neurons are predicting.  They are part of our genetic machinery that is the basis of self-preservation and survival.

We predict what others will do so we can work with them and protect ourselves from them.  We don’t just predict what other humans will do, we also predict what other primates, mammals, vertebrates, and insects will do.

This does connect us to them, but not in the way so-called mirror neurons might have.

Where do empathy and compassion come from?

What are empathy and compassion?

It’s easy to think of them as the same thing, or as gradations of the same thing, but they are quite different.  Here are comparable definitions I like:

Empathy: The ability to identify with or understand another being’s situation or feelings.

Compassion: Deep awareness of the suffering of a being accompanied by the wish to relieve it.

While it is easy to take the difference by comparing “identify with” and “deep awareness of”, the greater difference is the addition of “the wish to relieve it.”

Growing up as a (liberal) preacher’s kid, I was quite good at empathy.  I could easily learn that other people didn’t have what I have, both things and opportunities.  Empathy is knowledge, and I was always good at understanding any part of the world that was pointed out to me.

It took learning Buddhism later in life to appreciate compassion, which involves the recognition of suffering and the need to deal with it, neither of which is easy.

Empathy and compassion come from life experience.

I’ve heard many young people talk about empathy, and I believe it’s an important thing to learn and exercise.  It provides a connection to others, and opens us to understanding other’s lives and needs.

I’ve found that compelling narrations about compassion usually come from older adults.  They may have suffered themselves, or they may have had close relations or others who were suffering.

Compassion can be learned and trained.

We don’t usually learn empathy; it’s part of being human.  It can be lost in a traumatic childhood, but most people have it from a normal upbringing.

Some people develop compassion from growing up, depending on what their childhood is like, but most of us don’t really understand it: I didn’t.

Buddhism provides several ways to learn compassion.  Multiple ways are important because compassion is the fundamental underpinning of most Buddhist practices, and there is no one path that works for everyone.  I’m not going to talk about practices here: compassion is too big.

What I want to point out here is that we ultimately learn compassion by practicing it on ourselves, and this is perhaps the biggest difference from empathy.  Empathy is about “the other”; compassion is about all beings, including our selves.

Compassion is a choice.

This brings us back to the original issue in the title.  While ‘mirror neurons’ promised us effortless connection to the world, that promise was always empty.  Not only was the science weak, mirror neurons only looked outward.

Compassion only comes from looking inward.  By recognizing our own suffering, we can pay attention to what we need.  By finding what we need, we can both step further into our own suffering and recognize what others need.

What about reality?

With the ever growing impact of science on our lives, religion and spirituality have a greater role to play reminding us of our humanity. There is no contradiction between the two. Each gives valuable insights into the other. Both science and the teachings of the Buddha tell us of the fundamental unity of all things.

— His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama

If science proves facts that conflict with Buddhist understanding, Buddhism must change accordingly. We should always adopt a view that accords with the facts.

— His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama

Fortunately, the facts are catching up with what the Buddha discovered millennia ago.

***

John Light. I retired in 2016 from a 50 year career in system software engineering. My work included research on virtual environments, knowledge processing, information visualization, and ubiquitous computing. In 1997 I was introduced to the mysteries of the brain hemispheres, and I have been studying them ever since. I discovered meditation in 2006 and have been exploring and teaching it ever since. I am currently writing a book about the brain hemispheres which I believe can break logjams in information visualization, artificial intelligence, and education. I also write on Medium and Quora.