Christian psychologist and therapist Wayne E. Oates wrote, “Two tuning forks that are alike will pick up each other’s vibrations. Persons are prone to imitate people they like. Therefore, change can be created in another person by stimulating the desire to be like you.” (The Psychology of Religion. Word Books, 1973, p. 157). In 1973 Oates uttered this “true” statement from the standpoint of the emotional and the evident frameworks (direct observation) of psychology. Today the neurosciences can make this same statement. But more and more, their frame of reference is the biological and the scientific.
For example, Bruce Gearson writes about empathy in “Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, I Feel Your Pain After All” in the magazine In Character (Spring 2008) from a more clinical perspective. Here are some quotes from his article:
This much is becoming clear: The story of empathy is probably going to involve fairly recently discovered cells called mirror neurons. And it’s probably going to involve the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, a plum-sized area a couple of inches behind the eyebrows, where primal social emotions are thought to be packaged. It may involve a curled little strip of tissue in the middle of the brain called the anterior cingulate gyrus, which seems to detect and manage conflict. And it’s sure to involve other parts of that mighty prefrontal cortex, which just generally plays traffic cop in the busiest city in the universe, the human brain.
Such findings make empathy seem a richer and subtler process than we used to assume. We aren’t merely radios tuning in to other people’s frequencies, the research implies. We’re more like stringed instruments that other instruments set vibrating — and are amplified by the vibrations we get back — and so on in an infinite feedback loop. It changes the whole idea of communication between human beings from something almost robotic into something, well, almost organic.
Interestingly, like with physicists, despite more direct evidence, neuroscientists often revert to the use of metaphor to explain phenomenon. Here Gearson mixes metaphors to explain the dynamic relationship between modules:
A useful way of appreciating how the brain seems to work out “moral” issues is to think of it as a kind of Odd Couple–like partnership between two modules. You might call them, very unscientifically, the Grandmother Module and the Spock Module. (A third region, the anterior cingulate gyrus in the middle of the brain, seems also to be involved as a kind of referee between them.)
You can read Gearson’s article here.
