Mirror, mirror, in my brain...

I'm not sure that this is the most appropriate forum for this entry, simply because this is a general purpose blog, of random musings, often quite trivial. However, since I don't write anywhere else at the moment, I'm going to assume that it will connect with whoever is willing to read, with an open, inquisitive mind.

After a long time, I walked into a book shop yesterday. I was there to pick up a book for a friend and as I waited for it to be brought out, I scanned the latest hardcovers on display at the cash counter. I stopped at Viliyanur Ramachandran's The Tell Tale Brain.

The shopkeeper tempted me with the Rs.399 tag, knowing I'm a sucker for this sort of reading, but somewhere in the back of my mind, I remembered a review that said that Ramachandran's latest offering was a bit more terse than his earlier books, so I decided to check the general drift of The Tell Tale Brain on the internet before making up my mind.

The Los Angels Public Library, as part of its Podcasts, ALOUD @ Central Library, had a short address on the book by Ramachandran, followed by a brief question and answer session. It is available for free download here.

Let me begin by saying that his deep, machine gun oratory, especially the impossibly full rolling of "r"s gave me as much listening pleasure as did what he had to say. English becomes impossibly ruddy when it's used by the brain doc from Viliyanur, so I would say its worth a listen, even if you couldn't care less about the brain's frontal lobe or what it really does :-)

On to the content of his talk now, and some connections that I'm trying to make from there. Trust me, you don't have to be a nerd to follow along with his thinking - you just need common sense and an open mind.

During this podcast, Ramachandran chose to focus on these neurons in the brain called "mirror neurons".

Whenever we receive sensory stimulation, such as someone lovingly stroking our hand or poking our arm with a needle, thousands of neurons fire in the brain, sending pleasure or pain messages, as appropriate.

Beyond these, there are a small percentage of neurons (ballpark 10% according to Ramachandran), called "mirror neurons", that fire when we merely see someone else being touched/poked. Ramachandran calls these empathy or "Gandhi" neurons.

Apparently, when we see something painful being done to someone else, and mirror neurons fire, what happens in normal people is that tactile receptors in our skin overrule or send a "null" response to the brain, as if to say "no, you're not really being poked, you're just watching someone else get poked with a needle, so its okay to empathise, but you don't need to feel pain". That's why we don't really "feel" their physical pleasure or pain. So far, so good.

But in those with an amputated arm or leg, and who continue to have "phantom limbs", since there are no skin receptors to send the 'overrule' signal, they seem to be extra-sensitive to things happening to other people's limbs, that they observe. All well within the realm of common sense, right?

Now, Ramachandran pushes the point slightly further and says, a patient of his, a woman with a phantom limb, actually felt relief from severe pain by just watching her husband massage his own arm.

Ramachandran also makes a few more very interesting points in his talk regarding autism and mirron neurons, which I will take up in another entry, but here's the point I'd like to make from just he above observations.

Eastern religions have held that "empathy towards the other" is the hallmark of a true Sadhu or Realised One. In the Q and A session that follows Ramachandran's talk in the podcast, the audience and he speculate about whether "mirror neurons" could somehow be "strengthened", to make one more empathatic towards others. Ramachandran reacts by saying that there might be pharmacological methods to achieve this (such as the Esctasy pill)

I was immediately taken back to my first 10-day Vipassana course, where the main technology taught involved simply "observing" bodily sensations, starting from the skin and moving deeper into the body, all the while, "not reacting" to the sensation. In other words, you watched your own sensations, but without involvement, thereby not reacting to them. It was really tough.

However, by the time the residential, complete-silence, 10-day course was over, most people expressed a great sense of empathy towards all other participants. Most were able to sense and feel beyond their own bodies and minds, to what others were experiencing. It was a feeling of being "connected" to a larger self, beyond the boundaries of one's own conventional self. I have had this experience repeated, with much, much greater intensity, a second time in my life, through a very different practice, but the core still involved going "beyond the body".

My short point is this - this "equanimity" or "not-attaching-any-importance" to the signals from the sensory receptors in one's own body, might well amount to enhancing the signal of the "mirror" or "Gandhi" neurons. This might well be enabling meditators to pick up what is happening beyond the limits of their individual bodies and "tune in" to signals from other people around them.

The most realised saints always seem to have a peculiar disregard for their own physical body and seem to have the ability to sense things far beyond. Could we actually have a partial understanding, at a physical, scientific level, of how this happens?

Methinks this needs Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (FMRI) studies of meditators, targeted specifically to study mirror neuron activity, to get a better understanding of this phenomenon.

Sorry if I've completely lost you with this outrider entry. If any of it struck a chord, do comment. Cheers.