Episode 39 – Dr. Marco Iacoboni

welcome to the human experience podcast the only podcast designed to fuse your left and right brain hemispheres and feed it the most entertaining and mentally engaging topics on the planet as we approach our scent please make sure your frontal temporal and occipital lobes are in their full upright position as you take your seats consciousness relax your senses and allow us to take you on a journey we are the intimate strangers thank you for listening the

human experience is traveling like a vortex up through your spine into your cerebral cortex as we speak to my guest dr. Marco iacoboni Marco it’s a pleasure sir welcome to hxp so Marco I I really like your bio on your website it reads quote to be honest I really don’t give a damn about the brain I care about the human soul however I believe happen to believe that the souls in the mind and the mind is a functional process instantiated by the brain with its

interactions with the body and the environment how interesting oh thank you I must say that when we rerun the website for the lab and I asked every one of my trainees to write a little blurb on themselves and then we kind of a dry run looking at the website and they looked at my own yeah one of my trainees said are you sure you want to put that thing on on the website and it is that you know if you’re a neuroscientist you should

really care about the brain but the point I was trying to make any kind of a jokingly fashion is that yeah we study the brain but why do we celebrate not because of the brain itself because the brain is an important organ they really guides our lives and yet they went you know to say in a very concise ways that even though it’s an important organ that guides our life and determines how we behave it’s not just the brain the brain

it’s an organ the body and the body it’s really embedded and situated in the world and so we have to consider all these interactions even when we just study the brain that was the point of the bird right so I mean you are most widely known for your work on mirror neurons but social cognition and I know that you like to kind of talk about this how were mirror neurons discovered what walkest had a process so other words these scientists that incidentally wearing in

Italy I’m Italian and I’ve been living in Los Angeles for almost a quarter of a century now and never studying system in the brain of the monkey the controls grasping grasping is innocent we don’t even we don’t give it a second thought but we grasp things all the time if we are not able to grasp our life is really severely impaired and so they were studying other brain controls grasping because it’s an important way to figure out how to help patients that have

grasping deficits after say a brain damaged after like a stroke but one thing that I found and they were really surprised and they were so surprised that initially they wouldn’t believe themselves that they actually had found this thing and they did a lot of control experiments to really make sure that this was a real phenomenon they found at some of these cells that really send the signals from the brain of the monkey to the muscle of the hand of the monkeys so

that the monkey can grasp like a piece of rail raising and put him in mouth a banner and our something like that they found it some of these cells also file when the monkey is not moving at all it’s just who watching someone else making those grasping actions so something that if you had asked in your sand is 25 years ago is there something in the brain like that they would had said are you nuts it’s impossible so there was really nice

shell disbelief but then the idea was that well when the phenomenon was really established as a real phenomena the question was why do we have this stuff in the brain what is the adaptive advantage of every mirror neurons and so what are the apologies was that while maybe these cells are really important for making us understand what’s going on in the minds of other people without really having making too much effort so if I look at you grasping

a cup of coffee and neurons in my brain that fire up whenever I grasp something also fire but just watching you grasping a cup of coffee I had to you know he had what should do I’m basically activating in my own brain the same neurons they activate when we actually are grasping a cup of coffee and that means that we have this immediate connection an immediate understanding of the mental states and of the actions of other people hmm very interesting so do do all

mammals have these mirror neurons or is it just monkeys and humans good question um these cells were discovered in the monkey brain now we know we have also the same cells in the human brain we know for sure that songbirds those little cute bears that sing songs learn how to sing songs through some sort of mirror neurons his appearance in the brain of the songbird that fire when the bird is singing but also when the bird is listening to the song that he will

eventually sing it is possible to the arm Union the many other species one of the idea that we have is that in principle it could be a fairly simple mechanism to associate your mother plants what you plan to do with your body with the side of someone else doing the same thing but there is no direct evidence that there are mirror neurons in other species at least not so not yet and because the way near science is done we tend to study only certain species

with certain techniques so I don’t really see that we will discover mirror cells in other animals any time soon but mostly because people are not really looking and I would say that if I had to bet money I would say most likely some kind of mirroring happens in many species in many brain very interesting so how does how does the evolution and the growth inside the brain happen when like say for example when a child is learning looking in a

mirror and realizing that it’s it’s their own face that they’re seeing how does that growth happen and what can we learn from from this yeah that’s a very good question and I I must say we don’t have an answer because we don’t have hard data on this but we have certainly some speculation that we can make oh you made a good point that children even when they’re in the first day of life can look into it the mirror ring at their own face or reflected by a mirror

it turns out that they are not even aware that’s their own face you can make some test to demonstrate that but they like to do that I think the mirror neurons really get created so to speak by the interactions between the baby and the caregiver so what happened is that suppose I’m the baby and you’re the caregiver humans who tend to do is adults they tend to actually imitate what the baby does so if I’m the baby in and I’m smiling the caregiver tends to

smile back at the baby we like that we kind of like to join in and what happens in the baby’s brain the baby’s brain can simply associate it’s called associative learning it’s a fairly simple way in which brains learn out to do things on the brain of the baby can associate the motor plan for sale in making a smiling face in the sight of someone else making a smiley face and by doing that you create a mirror room for smile that’s

the way I think actually chameleons are are actually created we know that they’re probably I mean we know we speculate that they’re our premiere neurons at birth in just in an infant brain and that’s because even if you just look at infants really young infants these the work at any male surface than some years ago you can show that infants that were just born few minutes ago they can imitate some rudimentary facial gestures like you

know sticking your tongue out or protruding your lips and suggested maybe there are some mirroring cells already at birth but we think that a lot of mirroring cells in the brain of the baby actually get developed and are in a way become stronger and more represented in the baby baby’s brain by just these interactions with the caregiver you talk about in your research you talk about social interactions and how people might use these neurons to establish a higher

social status and I mean what is your research zone shown about like the the biomarker of social cognition and how does this work in regards to how we relate with other people good question and we think that xx a mirroring does is to create this immediate connection it’s a sort of we call it pre reflective because again you don’t have to think about it and these connections really the basis of one called empathy which is a fundamental aspect of social behavior

you need to empathize with other people in order to create a society on the other hand it’s also true that empathy is strongly linked to another thing that we think mirror neurons do which is imitation through imitation we learn how to do things if we are in social fairly noble context we look at other people behave and we tend to we tend to blend into the what they do it turns out that imitation is a fundamental aspects of human behavior and indeed it’s important

for learning but also it’s important for transmission of culture it also shows that imitative behavior in humans that humans tend to imitate people of two kinds either people that are like them or people that have a social status that they have power influence they were respected so what it tells us is that there is really strong link between the tendency to empathize and the tendency to actually conform in a tendency to also understand our

hierarchies work that tells us that this mirroring phenomenon is really embedded as a corner store of our ability to be social animals to really have mental states and thoughts and feelings about other people hmm yeah I mean one of your one of another one of your quotes that I really like is while we interact with other people we find ourselves so it’s how does this process happening in the brain itself I mean how have you guys tested this

well that’s that’s a good question so if you look for instance in again we can go back to early in life I told you that babies in the first year of life that alighted to play in front of a mirror and exceed their own image and they smile and they do things they have no clue that that’s their own face how do we know that if the baby falls asleep I can put a big red mark on his forehead and when the baby wakes up and he’s in front of the mirror he still plays but

doesn’t show any change in behavior now if you do the same trick a year later when the baby is almost two years old they’re almost like a toddler Blaine what happens is that the Trotter wakes up and looks at the mirror and sees the big thing on his forehead and then he starts crushing his forehead so his behavior or her behavior really shows that the baby is actually aware that that face is our own or its own face okay so that’s called self-awareness now

look let’s look at another phenomenon so we get a bunch of kids up toward the secretary of life some of these have self-awareness they passed the mirror test they show that this you know behavior that they’re really worried about what’s going on on the forehead with that big red mark some mothers don’t so they show that they are not aware that the face at the scene in front of a mirror is their own face we put them in pairs a pair kids that are

self-aware and a pair of kids that are not self-aware what happens to their imitated behavior what do they do spontaneously we don’t have to really tell them what to do they just pull interacting the kids that have self-awareness there will be the ones that imitate Theodore mo the kids attempt less self-awareness they didn’t show much less imitation what does it tell us it tells us that whenever you acquire self-awareness you’ll see choir

awareness of the other this is something for the Western mind is very difficult to grasp because we are so entrenched into individualism but for instance in the Eastern philosophies is well understood the development of self is also the development of the other and I think mirroring really mirroring in the brain really captures this very well wow that’s so profound yeah that’s very interesting how fast do you think this does the growth of this research is

occurring and how much new information are we discovering APRA about the brain oh well it’s going fast I mean we had really beautiful 10 years ran in which we did a lovely series of great experiments which were addressed in really the big question and so we are they important for imitation yes at the important for empathy yes do the Yelp us understand what’s going on there in the minds of other people when they plan to do something yes can they teach us

something about the father for instance we tend to be more empathic for people that belong to our own social group so I tend to empathize more you know I may give you a cartoonish example more with another nurse and instead with say a golf player and that’s also a phenomena that’s twelve established in the human behavior and it seems the mirroring is also relevant to that so we’re done of these and now we’re trying to address much more difficult question so for

instance how come people tend to be more empathic than others or for instance what is the role of mirroring in mental health or in mental disorders do we actually use mirroring for a recover from say brain damage and if we have say a motor deficit can we use mirroring to improve that those are more difficult questions and so it’s taking us a little longer to figure out exactly the answers one thing that we know about neuroscience know is that there’s plenty

of very good research and especially plenty of new tools that are coming along the to help us figure out these questions what what are some of the roles that mirror neurons play in regards to substance abusers and people who relapse an addiction good question still we had some behavioral data it suggested actually let me give you background information so we say you get patients that have alcohol abuse and you put them through a

rehab program first of all not a lot of patients actually succeed in coming out of their here program program completely clean from the substance abuse but something the problem is that these problems are very expensive and if you look at the ones that are successfully out of there’s just our collab use after say a rehab program a year later about two thirds two out of three of these guys actually are back into drinking that’s not a good stats

especially because these rehab programs are fairly expensive and we think that one of the reason this relapse is because of Miller meaning if I call it you know jokingly decide the dark side of mirroring if I quote with you supposing you’re outside this drinking problem and then I’m clean and went through rehab I’m fine and I’m going out with you socially seeing you drinking even though you know you’re not really getting wasted you just have been glass

of wine because you’re having you know light out and talking to me about your life see you’re drinking becomes a powerful cue for me to go back to drinking so we have to date one thing we are trying to do is to figure out can we actually suppress a little bit mirroring in these people and that’s the other complication that we are facing and trying to figure out how we can do control of mirroring it’s a very I mean we’re actually working on my lab is

mostly focusing on that how do you control mirroring because you if you figure out how to control it you can increase it or you can decrease it there will be an important thing to do and so we think that in substance abuse certainly mirroring as this negative effect of creating this tendency to relapse in people because they get these social cues hmm yeah I find this all very intriguing I mean so another aspect of your research uses

transcranial magnetic stimulation and in treating a variety of conditions how does this treatment work and what makes it so useful it’s nice about trance can make a stimulation in other kinds of techniques that we call journaling neuromodulation non-invasive neuromodulation but TMS no stimulation is probably the best is that they have non-invasive they’re very little side effects and they produce for cow stimulation of brain regions so I can

stimulate to one region of your brain and the effects of the my stimulation on to the region also spread throughout specific circuitry in your brain so we can target circuits in the brain of people and we can do that in a way that really doesn’t induce any side effect it’s really nice because of these properties it’s already used fairly successfully in the treatment of depression but we think that in principle can be used for a number of

other conditions and certainly it’s also well used to study the brain because for instance the eye thing we do is plane imaging but with brain imaging whenever I ask you to do something in DMR scanner and a sibling region the lights up I’m never sure that the regions the lights up is actually causally related to your behavior but if I use TMS with TMS I can actually stimulate the brain region and if I induce a disruption in your

behavior I know that there is a causal relation between that brain region in your behavior so these techniques are really very flexible they give us a lot of ways of studying the brain and they also give us the possibility of treating a number of neurological insecure disorders without having the side effects of for McCollum she has there has there been anything for you that you’ve found in your within your research that has been kind of a

Eureka moment or something mind-blowing that that you can share with our audience my research well it’s been a plenty of really exciting moments for instance when we started doing the work of mirroring we know which brain regions were in the monkey brain that contained mirror neurons and when I did my first imaging study on imitation and I found that very senior regions were showing the pattern of activity that I thought would be the pattern of activity that

the mirror neuron area would have that was some sort of a Eureka moment another one when we actually applied this kind of research to patients with all these memory palaces was that well if these patients have difficulty in really relating socially with other people perhaps it’s because they’re mirroring capacity is reduced and so if what mirroring does is really to create this very easy effortless connection between people if you don’t have that you can

still interact with others but it becomes much more requires much more effort to really have an interaction with others and to find out in fact those regions in these patients we notice that reduce mirroring there was to me neither in Eureka moment so there have been a few you’d see one thing I would say that when I started doing this work initially I read the scientific report and then I collaborated with the with the scientists that they made the

discovery in the monkey brain I must say that the papers were really you know too exciting but then I visit the lab and I saw the monkeys and lay recordings and you know the activity in these neurons and there was another Eureka moment it was just wow you can actually see the phenomenon as it unfolds in front of you so these are a number of them it’s been quite a lot of fun to be involved in this research yeah you you touched a lot

on empathy as well would you say that people such as sociopaths or people such as that of psychiatric disorders is this a problem for them I mean you having empathy because of the decreased mirror mirror neuron function yeah we certainly think there is a deficit in social cognition in a lot of mental health disorders indeed even in disorders in which drugs can control the symptoms let’s take the example of schizophrenia you may have a patient

with schizophrenia that is an auditory hallucination the patient hears voices inside his brain you can control that with pizza okay with drugs yet when the patient goes because back in the community the functioning of these patients in the community is really not good and it is that it’s because they have an impairment in social cognition a mirror neurons the mirroring and empathy are really cornerstone of social cognition so we think that there is a it

widespread interesting mirroring abducts the mirror Raymond sometimes in there may be even excessive mirroring in a number of mental health disorders certainly empathy you again it’s by many people many scholars and scientists it’s considered a cornerstone of social creation it doesn’t explain all social cognition but it certainly you need to add empathy to be a fairly functioning social agent and lack of empathy or reduced empathy makes interactions much

more difficult hmm so I mean what is something that is are there any exercises that we can do like mental exercises that help us better imitate or better fit in socially I would say yes I mean the first thing you want to do is to really just be sorta tuned to other people to really pay attention to what they do some of these really will come naturally to people that are naturally empathic I mean if you are empathic person you tend to do this naturally but

if you’re not you can relief I wouldn’t say force yourself you can make some little exercises which whenever you’re interacting with someone you really try to be attuned to them you can even try to if doesn’t come pollutants are most people do it naturally I mean if I we imitate our postures we imitate our hand gestures and that we eat ate even the words we use if I use the word sofa in a conversation with you you’re gonna probably use that word sofa in a later

on if rather than using the word couch so you have a choice but you cannot imitate me to do you mean you’re in conversation we tend to do that naturally but some people may have more difficulty in doing that it turns out and if you try to without being you know too overtly a parrot because if you do that too then the other person would became could get a little you know freaked out about what you’re doing but if you try to be a tune in a natural way

I just try to follow that the body language of the other person I think that that’s a nice way and really simple way to try to improve your capacity to empathize to be really attuned to others yeah I like that you’re your lab is also looking at the application of mirror neuron LED teaching ideas in the field of concept formation and imagination and role playing in learning and the effect it has on on sensor motor activity what

has been the results so far and and how can imagine if role immersion to be something that we would use to to learn as a learning tool yeah that’s actually torture it’s not research is really doing taking off a lot because I mean the research we do requires a lot of funding and we’re not being successful in recruiting a lot of funding for these switchers but I think that’s essential I think you won’t ever do is that we’re doing it all wrong when it comes to

teaching and learning really learning in real life it’s a multi-modal experience what do I mean with that I mean we mean that I use my my vision I used my hearing I use my sense of smell I use the sense of the body that’s the way we learn not to do things and it turns out when we when it comes to your the classroom we tend to have a much more impoverished way of teaching there are students sitting around and there is the teacher in front of them and the teacher

just talks we think that it’s much better to understand a concept if you actually use your imagination and you almost embody the concept you’re trying to learn and for instance in in Cara wave almost provocative slogan we say if you really want to understand the process of photosynthesis I mean eventually you’re gonna have to really learn the details of that that’s being figured out by the scientists but one way of doing that is whenever you’re

actually studying the whole process of photosynthesis you may use your imagination in imagining you’re the plant themselves and by doing that your concepts are actually much more grounded into something that you understand in a very solid way we’ve done some studies on college undergrads here at UCLA and really wish we were sure that some subjects actually learn much faster with this way terms are the summoner’s actually don’t learn that fast and

that’s the big obstacle we had to kind of face to figure out which are the individual differences that make some people really try with this approach about teaching and learning and some others don’t we think it’s a matter of belief that is if I’m teaching my undergrads amount I’m telling them I want you to use your body to mimic the constant you’re studying some of these kids will not feel wait a minute are you treating me like a kindergartener I mean

I’m a smart kid I mean UCLA so why should I do that and that creates really drop of empathy really even empathy for the constant you’re trying to learn and that’s an obstacle and that’s not going to help you hmm it’s very interesting would you would you say that by by consciously mirroring like say if I was in a situation where I needed someone to help me or to generate empathy from another person by by consciously mirroring them

would I elicit an empathy response as long as you do in a very subtle way yes I mean when it comes to very young subjects you don’t have to do it in a very subtle way you can do an experiment you can go to every rule next time you’re at the party and there are very young kids you know maybe in the first of a second in your life you imitate what they do and I love it but if you are interact with a with a with a cronut what you want to do is to really

try to really be attuned to what they do and that’s why actually we tend to do whenever people explain things to us we know the little it’s not we really have to not to understand what they’re saying but by nodding we tell them with our own body that we’re really under free I mean listening to what they’re saying and understanding what they’re saying so yeah I mean the way you want to do and by doing that the interesting thing is

that this created a virtuous circle I mean if you are really attuned to someone else then the efforts to really gets drawn to you too and then there is this really nice bonding between people it’s one of those things that it’s also very easy to break down I mean if you become distracted and you’re looking at somewhere else oh you’re really thinking about something that’s that person that is interacting with you perceives that immediately and so this

very nice connection can really be broken very quickly so that’s why I mean I don’t wanna convey the message that really is something that you requires a lot of effort to do this again maybe because I tend to be a very empathic guy it comes very natural but I would say that she’ll really take you long to really get to attune to others and then to get people drawn to you too so that there is this very nice bonding between people yeah it seems like these cells

play a huge role in in intelligence not only intelligence but emotional intelligence and the idea that we can fit into social groups by you know being able to imitate what what these people are doing and and also by looking at the people that we respect as people who hold social value and imitating what they’re doing so it’s very interesting everything that you guys are doing over there at lab what I mean have you have you guys

gotten into any of the theoretical usage usages of these these mirror neurons yet what do you read I mean a lot that’s like like the usage of a program to kind of simulate like in a computer like artificial intelligence yeah that’s a good question actually recently sort of ex machina which I think it’s the best movie in artificial intelligence ever made and yeah I think if you talk to people that build robots like Miami college she’s a professor in USC I’ve

talked to her and she told me you know before you guys discover yourselves while I was building my robots I was thinking exactly that I would need something the mirrors would in my robot the mirrors what other people are doing and so yeah there is a lot of both computational science and robotics and artificial intelligence that is trying to capitalize on this phenomenon it turns out the mirroring it’s probably even a more widespread phenomenon there

is a recent people just came out this week that shows that if you look at the activity in the brain in the motor cortex and you look at what happens in the model fibers in your muscles there is a lot of similarities between the neurons that fire in your brain and the activity that your fibers in your muscles your body parts are doing so mirroring seems to be really something that nature exploits a lot and I would say that if you want to build artificial

entities that are efficient as humans are and you should probably try to exploit the mirroring to yeah yeah yeah yeah that seems like the direction to go I mean we’re running out of time here Marco but is there is there anything that you have discovered recently or anything that you would like to share with our audience and this is this would be the moment to do it oh okay you put me on the spot the erection well I mean the thing we’re doing now is

three two and I told you earlier to figure out how to control it because I mean you need to assume that if you have this thing that you know whenever I see you doing something I tend to do it too turns out we don’t do that right we don’t imitate each other all the time otherwise that would be extremely dysfunctional and yet we don’t have to make even an effort to do that so what we’re trying to do is to figure out what is the interaction between mirroring

which we call the bottom-up process that is I see your face smiling and I can’t help it inside me my mirror self or smiling no fyra and most of my top-down processes how do I control it I mean I’m not it’s not that whenever you smile as my myself that’s I think we think that that’s really that he to figure out how this interaction creates a very efficient and fluent social life the other thing I wanna say is that I’ve been recently

thinking a lot about how this mirroring phenomenon in its control can actually go wrong and what do I mean with that I mean with that that there are situations in which we tend to rely so much on either our beliefs or on our practices that then they interact with the environment in a sort of bad way and they can create some really negative behaviors and I wanna end this by saying that the more I think about the brain the biotin it’s really evolution has

divides the brain to make it a device that really detects action the key that can be afforded by the environment and so you wanna have an environment that really does not afford bad actions and that really gets into even the level of policy can you actually use new science to figure out how to organize society and I want to say anything more specific than this because it’s a developing way of thinking I mean actually maybe the

topic of my next after reading after writing mirroring people there was I love that book so much that for many years I couldn’t write anything else because I had to fall in love with another story and I think I’m slowly falling in love with this idea that if you look at other brain works it’s really a device that detects potential actions and so you want to create an environment that will prevent some kinds of actions that will

facilitate some other kinds of actions let me put it that way I really like what you said about falling in love with the idea Marco I really appreciate your time sir thank you so much for that where can people find your work if I think this is very important to create awareness on this topic where can people find your work by your book I think mama JAMA is it you can certainly download it from online from various Kindle or iBooks I’m not too happy about you know

publish in the publishing industry in general but I’ve even you know how the Amazon if you can find it I don’t think it’s heavily distributed but it’s been what school a long seller I mean number of people keep buying it and I think it’s it’s a fun book it’s called mirroring people and I actually try to ride it in a way that it’s not just about the science and the concept but also explains that science even though we tend to think about it as a kind of

you know this almost impersonal activity it’s made by people people that have feelings and emotions and beliefs and so I try to talk about there too and I build sort of a narrative from three the basic science to the implication for our society a lot of people they read the books it’s one of the greatest we did the yet and so of course I have complete of interest but I still have that book so much that’s why I have written another book people keep asking me when

when you write in their book well whenever I fall in love with in our story that’s great man do you do you have a website though yeah I mean why my website is you actually just Google iacoboni lab you’ll find it but I’ll give you the the correct address we can make that link available in the post when we post this what otherwise Marco it’s been great having you here this is the human experience thank you guys so much for listening we will be back next week