Our brains can “mirror” the actions of those we watch. We feel our muscles clench when we watch a figure skater twist in the air, or when we crack a smile as a stage performer grins. That’s the work of the proposed “human mirror neuron network,” part of our visual brain. Basically, swaths of neurons in the human premotor cortex activate both when we are performing an action and watching someone else perform that action. The young science of our mirroring ability is rapidly gaining a spot in emotional neurobiology. After all, “motion” and “emotion” live just one letter apart.
Laughing and crying provide new entryways into the tangled pathways of the brain.
Laughter, real laugh-till-you-cry laughter, is one of many human emotional expressions. Arguably, laughing and its tearful counterpart, crying, are the loudest, most intrusive non-linguistic expressions of our species. But for all of that familiarity, they are little-understood behavioral mysteries parading in the light of everyday experience. Though evolutionary biologists have long explored the mammalian origins of emotional expression, human laughs and cries only rarely become subjects of cognitive neuroscience. But that may not stay the case. Laughing and crying, being live demonstrations of emotion and its social expression, provide new entryways into the tangled pathways of the brain.
For centuries, philosophers and physiologists have puzzled over the phenomenon of emotion. Where are joy, sadness, fear located in the “gelatinous substance” of the brain? wondered nineteenth century phrenologist Franz Gall. How is emotion’s expression related to subjective feeling? In the 1890s, psychologists William James and Carl Lange suggested we don’t cry because we are sad, rather, “we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble,” but other theories reigned. And though the James-Lange theory has had a resurgence in recent decades, not until fMRI technology revealed images of the emotional brain could we begin to empirically explore Shakespeare’s musing in The Merchant of Venice: “Tell me where is fancy bred / Or in the heart, or in the head?”
>> more at: Emotion’s Alchemy
