mussar and mirror neurons

Mussar and Mirror Neurons

The discovery of mirror neurons in the frontal lobes of monkeys, and their potential relevance to human brain evolution — which I speculate on in this essay — is the single most important "unreported" (or at least, unpublicized) story of the decade. I predict that mirror neurons will do for psychology what DNA did for biology: they will provide a unifying framework and help explain a host of mental abilities that have hitherto remained mysterious and inaccessible to experiments.
---V.S. Ramachandran

Last year, I began a new “spiritual practice.” When I came home the first night, I said to my husband, “Where has this been all my life?” It was like meeting my bashert, finally, after all these years. Why? All my life I have wanted something spiritual, something psychological, something ethical and something Jewish. I also am an extrovert. I tried practices both spiritual and psychological and this one seemed to have been waiting for me.

The word Mussar has many meanings, but as I am using it here, it is the revival of a 19th century spiritual practice that emerged at the cusp of medieval and modern period of Jewish history in Lituania(maybe that is it! I have ancestors from there.) Using medieval texts but playing with idea like the unconscious and speaking both to traditional Jews and those seduced by the enlightenworld, Mussar in the 19th century was the creation of Rabbi Israel Salanter and his followers. At the close of the 20th century, the practice began to see a revival. The branch of the revival I know is through the work of Rabbi Ira Stone.

The teaching of Rabbi Stone is powerful and feels like an adequate statement of what I would call my “faith”(as opposed to a reasoned out belief.) But if I am going to have faith in something(and I am) this is as close as perfect to me. “God leaves a trace, in the face of the other. The other commands us to bear his burden.” There is a great deal more to be said about mussar and its practice, Rabbi Stone’s theology, and many other matters, but for now I want to pause and ask some questions suggested to me by neuroscience.

How do we know that the other has a mind and it is like ours? How do we know what the other’s burden is ? How do we come to feel it is our duty to bear it or even share it? What makes us think their problem has anything to do with us? Presumably, something is going on in my body(mostly but not entirely located in my brain) that is making all this happen.


Since neuroscience offers to tell us where and how our brains are executing the various functions we know them to be executing, it would be interesting to see if brain science has anything to say about what might be going on in all this, on the level of analysis in which it specializes.(On another level, it could be God’s plan, but the neuroscientists are agnostic about that level—or at least should be.)

The questions about the other and about our knowing that other, feeling the other’s pain, resolving to bear the burden,etc. have been around for centuries. Today, medicine, psychology, philosophy and biology are talking to each other about them. And sitting at a place of honor at the table these days is the neuroscientist. Sometimes they even invite a theologian, but not always.

Our questions about the "other" are discussed in neuroscience under the topic “mind reading” which is not an occult practice but something most people do all day long. We assume that other people have minds and are thinking and feeling in ways analagous to our own.IF you think about it, that in itself is quite remarkable! This is the foundation of the next step, moral behavior(“If I would not like this done unto me, I should not do it unto them”) or, to take it further, altruistic behavior("his pain is my pain, and were I to bring him to a state of joy it would bring me there as well.")

There is a lively and quite nuanced debate in the neuroscience world concerning mind reading which I will try to summarize as clearly as possible, recognizing I am radically over simplifying. I will divide a few warring schools of thought into two(understanding that some scholars offer hybrid approaches,etc).

First, there is the school of thought that sees this through the lens of RATIONAL THOUGHT. It’s ancestors are Kant. Child as scientist, Lawrence Kohlberg. We begin as self centered little creatures, a bundle of inate wants and needs and urges(for food mostly) and as our brains develop, we start to learn to think. We have theories about the world which are refined as we grow. When we get to about 3 or 4 we can think about thinking, and conceptualize the thought that we might have held an idea in the past that is not true. We then take the next step and begin to impute such thought to others. Eventually we learn to take their role in our considerations of behavior, helped along by our societies rewards and punishments. In Kohlberg’s view, if we develop really far(and not everyone does), we can actually think about our society critically and transcend conventional thinking, universalize and become like John Rawles, able to think through a moral issue not even considering our place in the story but entirely from a position above the fray(one might say, although he doesn’t) from God’s position.

Obviously, there are some implications to this way of thinking about the relevant brain activity related to mussar. It draws a clear line, as mussar does, between humans and animals. What needs to be quarintined as we get smarter and thus more moral is a concern with ourselves and only our perspective(that’s the way a very young child thinks of these things, but when we get older we learn to think in terms of the other.) This is the place of the ego in this system, and it must be set aside. What keeps us from following through on all the good thoughts we have(assuming we have moved up the ladder well) is our animal instincts for food, pleasure, sex, etc that keep us focussed more on ourselves.

The view that is arising as a competitor is very new and still controversial, although it is being discussed in neuroscience circles and taken seriously outside them by philosophers who care. It is congruent with a different stream of philosophy, not Kant so much as . It is based on empirical observation followed by theory—the theory(which still needs much testing) is called Simulation Theory.

Before ever taking a picture of the inside of a human brain, scientists noticed:

*Monkeys watching a human eat(while having their brains photographed) had the same brain cells fire as when they themselve ate

*Babies cry when they hear human crying but not when they hear other noise of the same intensity and volume.

*Children under two can be deeply distressed when they see others in distress, and respond with appropriate caring behavior, even though in theory(see above) they don’t really understand that the other person has a mind and can think and feel. At least, not consciously.

*We watch a movie and cry, without consciously thinking about it and determining “I imagine that woman in the movie is sad. I would be. I will now cry.”Actually, if we thought about it, we would realize she is just an actress and we would not cry.

The idea began to emerge that empathy, seemingly a pretty high achievment, may be hardwired, and not something we learn if our cognition gets good enough. One of the other pieces of evidence for this line of theory is the existence of a class of people known as psychopaths. A true psychopath can do any of the cognitive tasks of perspective taking, and does them often, the better to manipulate people. But there seems to be a “missing piece” and somehow other’s distress simply doesn’t seem to distress them in the least, even when they caused it. Could we locate the process in others that seems to be missing in their brains?

In what seems to be an opposite problem, there are people diagnosed as autistic(or on the Asperger spectrum) who appear to have empathy for others but seem to lack the ability to read other’s minds or even the faces(the way the average person does). They don’t “get” social cues, and run into more or less difficulty in life(depending upon where they are on the spectrum). It seems like the process is derailed at some point, or gets sluggish and they do not accurately read others. And how does it help us understand the way our brains allow us to find the trace of God in the face of the other.

It is time to open the brain up, as neuroscientists can now do.
Here is what they discovered:

*Neurons for walking that light up when one sees someone else walk.

*Neurons for pain that light up when one sees someone else in pain.

*Neurons that allow us to read faces, especially anger and disgust. FaBER(Face based emotion recognition)

*A certain, distinct part of the brain is clearly activated when we smell a disgusting odor. When shown a film of someone getting a whiff of something disgusting(and registering it on their face), that very same area is seen to be activated.
*As Bruce Wexler put it, “Contagian is at the heart of emotion.”

They believe there are multiple neuron systems in the brain called mirror neurons.
These neurons are there in infants(the crying baby) and are there in monkeys(they were first discovered in monkeys.)
Does this mean monkeys and infants are moral? No. But they are empathic and we are empathic beyond our ability to even be aware of it(this is below consciousness).

These mirror neurons evolved for a reason, presumably because animals who could read other animals (and later early humans) had a better survival rate and could live to reproduce. We now put those mirror neurons as the basis of social interaction. This intuitive, gut connection to other’s emotions is not full blow empathy, yet it gives our choice to bear the burden of the other a richer, thinker, less theoretical basis.

Altruism, the highest ethical moment, may not have much to do with that thinking brain at all(how can rational thought get us to be completely without egoism). Self-sacrifice, the hyperbolic standard of mussar(and of Christianity) may only be explained by the possibility of mirroring joy from another’s joy. (Some have commented that they appreciate this research because it finally explains why people get so much from watching pornography.)


As Dr. Rizzolatti put it, “mirror neurons allow us to grasp the minds of others not through conceptual reasoning but through direct simulation. By feeling, not by thinking.” You know how someone is feeling because in a way you are feeling it too. You quite unconsciously and intuitively to some extent “bear their burden”

If people do such a good job of “feeling othes pain” and are naturally so empathic, why don’t they act on it more ? Our smart selves get in the way. The most abstract, non –animal, non-native part of us gets involved and gets us off track.

So here is a thought. Perhaps the yetzer ha tov and yetzer ha ra need to be thought of differently than we have.
Some of the Mussar texts from the past imagine a material and a physical realm. In brain science it is all physical, but at the highest levels of thought, there is a kind of “emergence,” some way in which the brain pulls it all together that is not visible to any imaging device and might be called “spiritual”.

The yetzer ha ra is often thought of as our animal nature, the part that needs to be “tamed” and “directed” by our highest “spiritual” thoughts. ( In fairness, Mussar, building on the rabbinic notions, did not do the kind of “splitting” that Christianity with its full fledged dualism engaged in. The urges were seen to have both good and bad elements, and the physical was never demeaned.) Nevertheless, mussar does tend to locate moral life in what distinguishes us from animals and what emerges as we develop into grown ups.

What if the yetzer ha tov is our unconscious and the...to be continued