The Social Animal (7 page)

In looking into Julia’s eyes, in touching her skin, in mimicking her gestures, Harold was starting a protoconversation, an unconscious volley of emotions, moods, and responses. Julia found herself playing along, staring into his eyes, getting him to open his mouth, getting him to shake his head.

Not long ago, a psychology class took advantage of the human capacity for this sort of protoconversation to play a trick on their professor. The class decided beforehand that they would look at him attentively when he lectured from the left side of the room but look away or appear distracted when he wandered over to the right side. As the class went on, the professor unconsciously stood more and more on the left side of the room. By the end, he was practically out the door. He had no idea what his students were doing, but he just felt better from that side of his room. His behavior was pulled by this invisible social gravity.

Of course Julia and Harold’s protoconversation was much deeper. Harold kept up Operation Motherhood with steady and relentless persistence, week after week, month after month, breaking down her barriers, rewiring her personality, insinuating himself in her every thought and feeling, gradually transforming her very identity.

Julia’s old personality battled back. You have to give her credit for that. She didn’t just surrender to this new creature without a struggle.

For most of the first year, Julia would breast-feed Harold from a chair in the corner of his room. At her baby shower, her friends, very few of whom had babies themselves, gave her the sorts of things they considered essential for successful nurturing. She had the audio and video baby monitors, the air purifier, the Baby Einstein mobiles, the de-humidifier, the electronic photo displays, the visually stimulating floor-mat, the rattles for manual dexterity, and the aurally soothing ocean-currents noise machine. She would sit there amidst all the gizmos, breast-feeding him, looking like a milkmaid Captain Kirk in the chair of the starship
Enterprise
.

One night, about seven months into Harold’s life, Julia was in the chair with Harold at her breast. The nightlight glowed softly and everything was quiet all around. It looked superficially like an idyllic maternal scene—a mother suckling her child, all filled with love and sweet affections. But if you could have read Julia’s mind at that moment, here’s what you would have found her saying: “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Help me! Help me! Will somebody please help me?”

At this moment—tired, oppressed, violated—she hated the little bastard. He’d entered her mind with tricks of sweet seduction, and once inside, he’d stomped over everything with the infant equivalent of jackboots.

He was half Cupid, half storm trooper. The greedy asshole wanted everything. Harold controlled the hours of her sleep, the span of her attention, the time she could shower, rest, or go to the bathroom. He controlled what she thought, how she looked, whether she cried. Julia was miserable and overwhelmed.

The average baby demands adult attention of one kind or another every twenty seconds. New mothers lose an average of seven hundred hours of sleep during that first year. Marital satisfaction plummets 70 percent, while the risk of maternal depression more than doubles. At the merest hint of discomfort Harold could let out a piercing scream that could leave Julia weeping in hysterics and Rob angry and miserable.

Exhausted, Julia would sit there in the chair, breast-feeding her little boy while thinking of the fat vessel she had become. Her thoughts raced through dark forests. She realized she would never again look as good in tight skirts. She’d never do anything on a whim. Instead, she’d get sucked into the vapid attitudes of the bourgeois mommy wars. She’d already come into contact with the pious breast-feeding crusaders (the über-boobers), the self-righteous playdate queens who would correct her parenting techniques (the sanctimommies), and the mopey martyr mommies who would bitch on endlessly about how rotten their lives were and how inconsiderate their husbands and parents had become. She’d get involved in those numbingly dull playground conversations, and as Jill Lepore once noted, they’d be all the same. The mothers would all want forgiveness, and the fathers would all want applause.

She could say farewell to the partygoing life that gave her such pleasure. Instead, Julia saw a grim future spreading out before her—school lunches, recycling sermons, strep tests, ear infections, and hours and hours spent praying for nap time. To top it all off, women who give birth to boys have shorter life expectancies because the boys’ testosterone can compromise their immune system.

Then, maybe a second after this anger and depression had flashed across her mind, Julia would lean back into the chair and hold Harold’s head up to her nose. Then Harold would lie on her chest, grab her pinkie with his little hand, and start suckling again. Little tears of joy and gratitude would well up in her eyes.

Kenneth Kaye has suggested that human infants are the only mammalian infants who nurse in bursts, sucking for a few seconds then pausing while the nipple is still in the mouth, and then resuming for another round. This pause, Kaye theorizes, induces the mother to jiggle her baby. When the baby is two days old, mothers jiggle for about three seconds. When the baby is a few weeks old, the jiggle is down to two.

These movements sent Julia and Harold into a sort of ballet with its own rhythm. Harold paused, Julia jiggled; Harold paused, Julia jiggled. It was a conversation. As Harold aged, this rhythm would continue. He’d look at her, and she’d look at him. Their world was structured by dialogue.

It’s almost musical the way the rhythm between mother and child evolves. Julia, no natural vocalist, found herself singing to him at the oddest moments—mostly, for some reason, songs from
West Side Story
. She read
The Wall Street Journal
to him in the morning and amused herself by reading every story that had to do with the Federal Reserve Board in motherese, the slow, exaggerated, singsong intonation that mothers in all cultures across the world use when speaking to their young.

Sometimes, as the months went by, she would begin impersonator training. She would mold her face into some expression and then get Harold to mimic until he looked like some celebrity. By scowling she could get him to look like Mussolini. By growling, Churchill. By opening her mouth and looking scared, Jerry Lewis. Sometimes when he smiled it was actually disconcerting. He gave a knowing, devious smile like some fraternity scuzzball who’d put a hidden camera in her shower.

Harold was so desperate to bond that, if the tempo of their conversation was interrupted, his whole world could fall to pieces. Scientists conduct a type of experiment they call “still-face” research. They ask a mother to interrupt her interactions with her child and adopt a blank, passive expression. Babies find this extremely disconcerting. They tense, cry, and fuss. Babies make a strenuous effort to regain their mother’s attention, and if there is still no response they, too, become passive and withdrawn. That’s because babies organize their internal states by seeing their own minds reflected back at them in the faces of others.

Except when Julia was completely exhausted, their conversations went on like a symphony. Harold’s energy was regulated by her energy. His brain was built by her brain.

By the ninth month, Harold still had no sense of self-awareness. He was still limited in so many ways. But he had done what he needed to do to survive and flourish. He had intertwined his mind with the mind of another. Out of this relationship his own faculties would grow.

It’s tempting to think that people grow like plants. You add nourishment to the seed, and an individual plant grows up. But that’s not so. Mammal brains grow properly only when they are able to interpenetrate with another. Rat pups who are licked and groomed by their mothers have more synaptic connections than rat pups who aren’t. Rats who are separated from their mothers for twenty-four hours lose twice as many brain cells in the cerebral and cerebellar cortices than rats who are not separated. Rats raised in interesting environments have 25 percent more synapses than those raised in ordinary cages. Though some mysterious emotional outpourings produce physical changes.

Back in the 1930s, H. M. Skeels studied mentally disabled orphans who were living in an institution but were subsequently adopted. After four years, their IQs diverged an amazing fifty points from those of the orphans who were not adopted. And the remarkable thing is that the kids who were adopted were not improved by tutoring and lecturing. The mothers who adopted them were also mentally disabled and living in a different institution. It was the mother’s love and attention that produced the IQ spike.

By now, Harold’s face lit up when Julia entered the room. This was good because Julia was coming apart at the seams. She hadn’t slept well in months. She once considered herself relatively tidy, but now her house looked like a corner of Rome after a visit from the barbarian hordes. Franklin Roosevelt was able to launch the New Deal in the amount of time that had passed since her last witty observation. But in the mornings Harold let out a big smile and he got to live another day.

One morning, it dawned on Julia that she knew Harold better than any other person on earth. She knew the ways in which he needed her. She knew his difficulty in making transitions from one setting to another. She sensed, sadly, that he seemed to long for some sort of connection from her that she would never be able to offer.

Yet they had never actually exchanged a word of conversation. Harold didn’t talk. They got to know each other largely through touch, tears, looks, smell, and laughter. Julia had always assumed that meanings and concepts came through language, but now she realized that it was possible to have a complex human relationship without words.

Philosophers have long argued about the process people use to understand one another. Some believe that we are careful theorizers. We come up with hypotheses about how other people will behave, and then test those hypotheses against the evidence we observe minute by minute. In this theory, people come across as rational scientists, constantly weighing evidence and testing explanations. And there’s clear evidence that this sort of hypothesis testing is part of how we understand one another. But these days most of the research points to the primacy of a rival hypothesis: that we automatically simulate others, and understand what others feel by feeling a version of what they are experiencing, in ourselves. In this view, people aren’t cold theorizers who are making judgments about other creatures. They are unconscious Method actors who understand by sharing or at least simulating the responses they see in the people around them. We’re able to function in a social world because we partially permeate each other’s minds and understand—some people more, some people less. Human beings understand others in themselves, and they form themselves by reenacting the internal processes they pick up from others.

In 1992 researchers at the University of Parma in Italy were studying the brains of macaque monkeys, when they noticed a strange phenomenon. When a monkey saw a human researcher grab a peanut and bring it to his mouth, the monkey’s brain would fire just as if the monkey were itself grabbing a peanut and bringing it to its own mouth, even though the monkey wasn’t actually moving at all. The monkey was automatically simulating the mental processes it observed in another.

So was born the theory of mirror neurons, the idea that we have in our heads neurons that automatically re-create the mental patterns of those around us. Mirror neurons are not physically different from any other sort of neuron; it’s the way the former are connected that seems to enable them to perform this remarkable task of deep imitation.

Over the last few years mirror neurons have become one of the most hyped and debated issues in all of neuroscience. Some scientists believe mirror neurons are akin to
DNA
, and will revolutionize our understanding of how people internally process outer experiences, how we learn from and communicate with others. Others think the whole idea is vastly overblown. They are quick to point out that the phrase “mirror neurons” is patently misleading because it suggests the mimicking skill is contained in the neurons, not in the networks in the brain. But there does seem to be a widely held view that monkey and human brains have an automatic ability to perform deep imitation, and in this way share mental processes across the invisible space between them. As Marco Iacoboni has observed, people are able to feel what others experience as if it were happening to them.

The monkeys in Parma not only mimicked the actions they observed, they seemed to unconsciously evaluate the intentions behind them. Their neurons fired intensely when a glass was picked up in a context that suggested drinking, but they did not fire the same way when an empty glass was picked up in a context that suggested cleaning up. The monkey’s brains would not fire when scientists merely pantomimed picking up a raisin, but they did fire when the scientists picked up a real raisin. Their neurons fired in a certain characteristic pattern when they saw a scientist tearing a piece of paper, but they also fired in that same pattern when they merely heard a scientist tearing paper. In other words these weren’t mere “monkey see, monkey do” imitations of physical actions. The way the brains reacted to an action was inextricably linked to the goal implied by the action. We sometimes assume that the mental process of perceiving an action is distinct from the mental process of evaluating an action. But in these examples, the processes of perception and evaluation are all intermingled. They share the same representational systems, the same network patterns in the brain.