A review of Giacacomo Rizzolatti & Corrado Sinigaglia’s Mirrors in the Brain and a storyteller’s look at why it matters.

Giocama Rizzolatti and his colleagues at the University of Parma have undertaken research into what have become known as ‘mirror neurons’. The early stages of research were received with a fair amount of scepticism but now they’re generally regarded as being for real and they change the accepted view on how perception and cognition work and how empathy functions.

Rizzolatti’s work comes out of the brain research that has been mapping the brain and its functions over the last twenty years or so. His discovery, through primate research, is that when an observer sees someone act with intention, not only do they respond perceptively, as revealed by neuron activity, but also as if they themselves were doing the action. This does away with the old division of perception, cognition and action as discrete activities.

One fascinating aspect of his research is the centrality of intention. Random movements do not trigger a mirror neuron response but reaching out to grasp something will. We (that is, us humans and the brainier primates) recognise hand shape and react accordingly. If I see someone making a grasping hand shape I will have a parallel neuron pattern fire in my brain. There is a strict motor-visual congruence in neurological terms in the brain activity. When I see a hand taking on a grasping shape I may not move, but neurologically my hand does the same movement.

This connection extends to objects as well. If I am presented with a cup, a hammer or a pair of knitting needles I neurologically prepare myself to grasp them. There may be no outward movement but the neurons required to do the movement are already in action. Of course I need to understand that the object in front of me is some kind of tool and need some idea of how to grasp them effectively, so the knitting-needle example may not be such a good one for me.

We can detect movement around our face and body and do not need to be looking directly at an object for it to get a neurological reaction from us. Interestingly, when we use a tool our functional space extends to include the tool we are using. The trick is to hold the tool with intention - if you just let the screwdriver dangle from your hand it doesn’t show up neurologically. This functional space is extremely plastic and will even reach out into the space around us that we are not directly connected to. If an object is coming towards us we will, at a certain point, include it in our functional space and the quicker its coming the sooner we include it, in order to prepare ourselves to hit it back, catch it or get out of the way.

This work helps create a shared world in which we, more or less sentient beings, operate. Having been exposed to so much research on how incomplete and ineffective much of our perception and communication is, it is a relief to see how perceiver and perceived create a world in mutuality. My perception of your waving at me really does depend on your deliberate and intended action of waving, and just as I am mirroring your wave, so you will mirror my smile in response.

Once we move away from physical and object-related activity into intransitive (without an object) communicative activity, things become a little more complicated and the strict motor-visual neuronal congruence breaks down. Interestingly, Rizzolatti sees verbal language being derived, not from calls etc, but from eating and grooming behaviour. Grooming and lip-smacking are important bonding activities in primates and language may well have developed as a vocal and physical unity, so that words and gestures would be unimaginable as separate entities. Gesture and oral language are still neurally connected, however it is clear that, at some point, words and gestures did become separable otherwise you would not be able to read this. This points to a neurological development which is only found in humans, namely the echo-mirror system where exposure to words alone can provoke a subjective neurological state as if the actions and events described by the words were actually happening to us.

Facial expressions of joy, distress, disgust etc were also shown to provoke a mirror response in observers, often including an overt physical imitation of the face subjects were exposed to as well as a concomitant emotional reaction. This is a phenomenon often encountered by storytellers who frequently encounter an entire audience, particularly the younger variety, unconsciously mirroring their own facial expression back to them.

It is, of course, possible to understand events and actions by other means, however only the mirror neuron system will give an immediate and total response including intention, action and affect giving a clear indication of what it is like to be that other person in that moment and, in turn, engender a sense of empathy in us and understanding of the consequences of our actions.

Mirror Neurons in Performance

Rizzolatti prefaces his book by referring to the influential theatre director Peter Brook who said that the discovery of mirror neurons helps explain the complicity of audience and performer in which the magic of performance takes place.

The shared space that mirror neurons create are dependent on a mutuality of gaze. In other words, I see you seeing me and you see me seeing you. This loop is reminiscent of much neural activity and is, for this storyteller at least, a sine qua non of the art-form. Of course, you can put the audience in the dark and create a lighting generated fourth wall if that is what you want to do, however the natural choice for me is to be able to see the audience and ideally, as in many informal venues where seating is not in parallel lines, where the audience can see itself.

I would like to nuance the sharing of emotion in storytelling. In transitive mirror neuron activity your intentional movement stimulates my mirror neurons and I have my version of the experience of your action. It is important to note that it is my version. When we come to the communicative, non-transitive mirror neuron activity there is often an affective component and, although I experience an emotion as if I was in the situation portrayed, it is my emotion not yours.

It is important to recognise the difference or there is the danger of falling into the pathetic fallacy. The principle “I feel it so you feel it” can lead to some very gooey, over-emotive performing where the over-riding emotion evoked is one of embarrassment. I was working recently with John Wright, the English theatre director and founder of Trestle Theatre and Told by an Idiot, who said that the emotions we, as audience members, feel are generated by the dramatic context and the behaviour exhibited rather than any emoting done by the performers.

Yes, there is a feeling of shared experience and communication and, although the mutual gaze is important in establishing a mode of communication where real people really look at each other, there are also clear and very different roles and expectations for both audience and performer. I have written elsewhere about the porous space and the shared nature of the storytelling experience for performer and audience, however this focus on mirror neurons reminds us that there is, necessarily, also a separation aspect of the semi-permeable membrane between the two parties.

With regard to neuron activity that does not engender external movement it is important to understand that this does not mean that the activity is biologically trivial. Mabel Todd (The Thinking Body) was a pioneer in the field of visualisation of action to improve quality of movement in the 20’s and 30’s of the twentieth century and her legacy was developed by, amongst others, Barbara Clarke and Lulu Sweigard before emerging as central parts of body-mind techniques such as Feldenkrais and the Franklin Method. Its impact is, perhaps, most keenly felt in sports psychology where numerous studies have demonstrated that x hours of physical training combined with mental simulation of movement is much more beneficial than the same period of physical training alone.

So, the group of people who sit rapt as a story is told only look passive. Neurologically they are scaling mountains, flying on eagles’ backs and encountering the love of their life and now we have scientific verification that it is not simply an idea but an embodied experience of perception and affect.