Mirror Neurons: Are there people who feel others' pain?

all doing the same. That's what we're doing. So Chuckers, I got, as I said right before we started recording, I've I've got no intro for this, but this is a listener request times infinity or so yeah, I gotta I got an intro. Okay, let's hear. It just came to me. Okay, Josh, remember years ago when you were a young child watching NFL football, All in the quarterback for the Washington Redskins, Joe. Thisman horrifically broke his leg.

Lawrence Taylor broke his leg. It's one of the great tragedies of my life that I missed that you did. I never saw it. You know, when you were watching any sporting event and you see a knee go in a direction it shouldn't go in Willis Mcgahey, okay, there you go exactly when it was flopping around. Uh did you feel a pain in your leg when that happened? Yeah? Yeah, I felt some sort of discomfort. Okay, I feel a shooting pain when I see it's it's usually a bone

or a leg going away. It's not supposed to go like a knife wound. Wouldn't bother me, it wouldn't make me grab my chest. But that always sends a shooting pain through my leg. And that, buddy, maybe a mild form of synaesthesia. Yes, it might be. It's my first intro. That's very good, Chuck. I think we should, uh, we should appropriately clap for that, Jerry. Yes, I cut for myself, so just be a two person lame slow clap. It was a good clap. It's a good intro, Chuck. And

this is news to me. I had no idea that you were a synistet. Well, I don't know if that really counts. I kind of thought everyone felt a shooting pain when that kind of thing happened. But you know, but you sound like a developmental synistet born with it people. Yeah, people who are born with synesthesia tend to think that this is a very normal occurrence that everybody feels as well. Yeah. Yeah,

that's the only time it happens though. It's just with leg injuries, well breaks and things like when limbs just do things that aren't supposed to they're not supposed to do. I don't see the number three is orange. We'll get to that later, but we definitely what but what you're talking about is mirror touch synesthesia. Yeah, the first one, Yeah, yes, okay, do you want to go into it? Yeah? Why not? What are you waiting for? That's one of that I

just did the intro. I thought when you hand it over, so I'm handing it over. Yeah, this is all reverse and it's not like mirror reverse. It's all just confusing. Um, all right, Well, mirror touch synaesthesia is a I don't know if you could call it a disorder, maybe a condition, we'll say conditions. It's a condition where a person actually experiences a touch or an injury, uh, that they're observing

on someone else. And because it's mirror touch, if saying I'm facing you right, which you are right, and your left arm gets touched, I would feel it in my right arm right. And if I were standing next to you and your left arm were touched, I would feel it in my left arm too. This is not supposed

to happen normally. No, pretty weird it is, And apparently for the the I guess, truly advanced mirror touch synisthts like you can't watch a horror movie because the the empathy involved is so extreme that they it's unbearable to watch. Like you feel like these things are happening to you, And there's no There's a lot of stuff we need to point out, but chief among them is there's no

confusion here. These people aren't confused. They don't think they're really you know, Jack Nicholson getting hit in the head with a baseball bat by Shelley Duval, right, They don't think that's happening to them, but they still experience this, right. That's number one. Number two is this is not imagination, right, right, Like, these people aren't deluded, No, no, anymore than than say a person with mirror touch synesthesia feeling themselves being pinched

when they want someone else being pinched. That's no more a delusion than you or I being pinched that experience, right, Yeah, they're they're considered uh neurologically normal quote unquote, right. And we also know that they are having these real experiences because of our friend the Wonder Machine, which has been employed to UM investigate synesthesia in all forms, and it shows UM that the for example, I don't I can't come up with one from you or touching neuruns, but

we'll we'll use the color grapheme. No, we'll use the sound color synesthesia. Okay, Yeah, there's all different types and and this is another one. Sound color is when you associate sound with color. Right. So if you have somebody who has sound color synesthesia and the m r I all right, and you play a musical note for them, the region of the brain that uh that that experiences or governs our understanding of musical notes is activated, as is the region of the brain that's associated with colors.

So these people are experiencing both. There's no way to separate them, and it's not an association like, um, you were wearing a blue Evil Kinevel jumpsuit the first time you heard, you know, a particular box concerto, right, although it was you work and you may associate that, so you may have a visual image in your mind of that blue jump suit or even that shade of blue whenever you hear that concerto. This is not what we're talking about. This is a mixture of the senses in

its most definitive form. Yeah. Oftentimes they say they will even be a projection of that color, a literal projection that they see. And it sounds cookie if you've never experienced it, but to them it seems completely normal. Well yeah, um, I think once that once they realize that they're cinis seats and that this isn't normal, Uh, it becomes tiresome, from what I understand. I was reading an interview with

Dr Oliver Sacks, the Awakenings guy. He's been hanging with cinis seats for many decades now, so he's some something of an authority on it, and he was saying that a lot of them get kind of tired of it, like I really wish I could just listen to music without seeing all the colors. Well, a lot of people use it too, though, well yeah, cre creatively sure. Sure. Famous sinnisthetes have have remarked that it has helped them with their memory. I gotta study on that, which we'll

get too later. But we're talking about Duke Ellington. Yeah, no, slouch no, uh frowns Franz list YEP composer Nabokov, writer actually Nabokov. In his autobiography, he talks about how he started to um realize that he was syn aesthetic when he was a little kid. Um he was pointing to these, uh, I guess the alphabet and they were just colorless um letters.

But he was talking about the colors of the letters, and his mother came over and agreed with them that the letters were indeed colored, but um, she disagreed with what colors the letters were. So he came to realize as he grew older that he and his mother were syn aesthetic, and actually, strangely enough, his wife turned out to be a synisty too. Well they do think it's hereditary,

for sure, but get this. He also couldn't hear music, Like he could hear set the sound, but he couldn't hear music, so he couldn't hear a high or a low pitch, and he couldn't hear discordant. What we see now, he was a color graphyme synasty all right, so that's two. We'll go ahead and say the other two word taste, words associated with taste and taste, touch, And there's all kinds of groupings of these. It's not just those. Apparently,

they can be paired in all sorts of ways. And I think they said it's rare, but some people even have, uh, involve three or more of their senses. Yes, I mean crazy, right, And there's no besides, you know, color graphemes synesthesia. It's

not like you just have that. You can have different types of synesthesia, and you can also have them to different degrees, so much so that um researchers are are coming to believe that one out of it, every one dred or two hundred people have synesthesia, Yeah, to some to some degree, like you, right, And it's also specific to the person, so everyone's is their own, right, which is why three isn't always blue for every synasty, which is why Nabokov and his mother were arguing about why

you know what colors were? What? Uh, there's another one I found too, called time space synesthesia. Did you see this this? Uh? They kind of referenced it in the article. As far as some people even see certain months and days as shapes. But this there's a psychologist named David Brang who his theory is that people can literally see time as a space. They see it as a spatial construct.

So he found this one woman in a study who was able to see the year as a circular ring surrounding her body, and it rotated clockwise throughout the year, and the current month resided inside of her chest, in the past month resided on the front of her chest. Isn't that crazy? And when I say crazy, I'm not being derogatory. Fascinating? Yes, right, well, yeah, of course we

use those interchangeably around here, don't we. Well, um, that woman can probably tell you exactly what happened on a certain day of a given year, because one of the one of the benefits that the researchers believe um synists are bestowed with is uh better working memory. There's different associations. It's not just one association. It's you're using two regions of the brain to form memories or that are elicited as a response to music or a letter or something

like that. While he died, he did two studies. You want to hear that I do. He took the same people the time space. Uh is it sin a sinists, sinists synist synistates. Yeah, he took the time space synist eats and he did a He asked him to memorize an unfamiliar spatial calendar and then reproduce it. And he then he got you know, normal people to do it, and the results showed that they could recall events in

time like light years beyond the non synistates. And they found on average that they synistates have about a hundred and twenty three different facts that they can call up about a specific event in our lives in their life, compared to thirty nine for your average Joe. So it's it's definitely doubling your pleasure with the memory. You're fun with synesthesia, Chuck. Um, you were talking about studies and tests. Uh. Dr Sax mentioned a pretty simple test for somebody with

color grapheme synesthesia. Um, and it's brilliant and it's simplicity. But you just put a piece of paper in front of them with a scattering a random scattering of fives and ss and say pick out five siness is as fast as you can and for a synist because remember this isn't an association like they literally five it looks red, s looks with other numbers and letters. No, just five

sinesses because they look similar. So the Cyneses should be able to pick out the five Sinesses and no time flat like because blue and red, because it's not just a black printed number letter that looks similar to want to know, it will clearly look like this one's red, this one's green, this one's red, this one's green, green, green, red, like a human highlighter pretty much, you know, that's why you use a highlighter so it stands out. But think

about this. Can you imagine trying to study if do you remember back in like seventh grade, those fat pens that have four different color inks in them, and the girls with love notes with one letter for and when they really really liked you, like each letter would be a different um, a different color, and it was just a headache and nightmare and you're like, I don't like you, you know you with that that puffy bang thing that's

all hairsprayed going on. Ye much later for me, seventh grade for me was that was still uh oh yeah, everybody j everybody's keeping on trucking, spiky jone jet hair. That's what was going on. Nice Chuck, this is appears to be genetic in origin. Yeah, that's what they think because usually more than one person your family has it at a time. Yeah. Old Jacob Silverman not to be

confused with old Kirk Christiansen. Uh he uh. He wrote about UM a researcher named Sarah Jane Blake Moore who was delivering a lecture and mentioned, uh that she had heard of people who confused UM other people's touches for their own, right, she's talking about mirror touch synistats. And a woman in the audience, I guess during the Q and A session said, wait, I thought everybody felt that

it was like, what is going on here? Sarah Jane Blakemore is like, let's go to your home, and they did, and she found out that eleven of her family members had some form of synis teach. So if they think it it does have a genetic basis, but check up. Writing an article on a skin condition called epidermal lisis belosa, okay, basically you get blisters really easy. Okay. Researchers have determined that ten genes are in order, are in play or

mutated to have epidermalos epidermal lisis belosa. And that's just for a blister. Can you imagine the number of genes and have to be mutated in the specific combinations to form synesthesia? Crazy amounts? It is crazy and we mean fascinating. Uh, where should we go here? We got a mirror neurons? Well, hold on, let's talk about one other thing first. Um, we with synesthesia, there's two types. We talked about developmental synesthes who think that this everybody experiences this because they're

born with it. Sure, um. And then there's acquired synesthesia. And this is most predominantly seen in people who lose their sight after a certain age, right, or if you have a brain injury or do lots of drugs. Yeah, drug use can can lead to I guess a kind of temporary synesthesia from what I've read. But like if you go blind, Um, apparently your your brain's visual center, after it's been trained to take in visual information, it's

still hungry for it, so it starts. Apparently your synesthesia can just come in like gang Busters after you lose your site, even when you didn't have it before. And you remember that movie Mask who could forget? Of course you remember the part where Rocky Dennis is teaching his blind girlfriend what colors the coldest blue, hotest red? Right, he puts her hand under some cold water and this is blue and what he heated like a rock up in a camp fire and gave it to her to

teach her red and teach her a lesson. And he smacked her in the face and said that's orange, right, get it right? O pain? Yeah, I think that's the I can't tell, and I don't know that a neurologist could tell you whether that was actually developing synesthesia? Right. That was Laura Dern, wasn't it. I think it was, yeah, a young Laura Dern. Yeah, and Rocky Dennis was Eric Stoltz and share with share Eric stolts in a lot of prosthetic makeup. Yeah, good move, great movie. I love

that Sam Elliott too. Everybody was in that. John Travolta, Tom Cruise, Beck Beck was in it. Yeah. Well, and who can forget the cameo by Liberaci. I know it was blew me away. He was the mask he turned out to be, not even metaphorically like Rocky Dennis took his mask off and it was Liberaci. Yeah, what a classic. Are we a mirror neurons? We definitely if we're not wearing Big Trouble Buddy. Oh wait show No really? Yeah okay.

Another pop culture references Uman Fantasia is commonly pointed to as about the closest a non SYNISTI could come to experire encing synesthesia short hallucinating. Interesting, Yeah, because the almost every motion and color and change in lighting is associated with Yeah that I can't get through that thing anymore. I can't think. When I was a little kid, I thought it was neat, but now it's just unsettling. Yeah, it's boring, alright, Chuck, I believe we have arrived at

mirror neurons. So mirror neurons, Josh, I didn't realize this, but they were discovered only in in Maccaque monkeys by accident. Yeah. Uh. There were these dudes in Italy, the neuroscientists at the University of Parma, and I will read their names because I love Italians. It was a Giacomo Rizzolatti was the first one, and Vittorio Galsi it's the second one. And the third one was Leonardo Foghassi. I like the last guy's name the most. Fagassi Yeah, he's good. So they

make a mean pasta sauce too. So they were doing a little study on the premotor neuron dynamics. So they ran some electrodes into a macaque monkey, like you said, to the premotor cortex to monitor neural activity when the monkey like would reach for something. It's all going fine. They were learning whatever they were learning, eating some spaghetti, and all of a sudden, one of the guys, is how the story goes, at least, came into the room and like reached for a raisin I think they said

it was. And the monkey was still hooked up, and they saw that his brain started firing the same as it did when he had actually reached for it, and they all went say, it's it's a punsy nice And all of a sudden they had stumbled upon what one of them calls the biggest neuroscientific discovery of the decade. And he went on to say that mere neurons will do for psychology what DNA has done for biology. It's

very funny, you know, provide a unifying framework. That's funny that he said that, because that that's a lot of foresight for that one single guy. Because that's exactly what it's done. Oh yeah, big time. I mean that basically, mirror neurons are how we learn to do everything right, Think about swinging a baseball back. You don't just walk up and go, oh, there you go. You learn it by observing other people. At the same time, you can make the case that culture, UM other kinds of acquired

learning aside from swinging baseball batch um. The theory of the mind, where we can put ourselves in other people's situations to predict their behavior. All of this is accounted for by mirror neurons. A biological basis for empathy. Yes, crazy, it is crazy, UM. And I think also, uh, empaths, people who have severe empathy real empathy, UM, tend to have more active mirror neurons. And uh people with autism

tend to not display any motor mirror neuron activities. You understand one and you might explain the other is what are thinking? Um? Also, chuck, the that was just mirror neurons were just observed in humans for the first time this year. Yeah U c l A. Yeah, and apparently there were have much more robust than even the monkeys do. Right, So they are you talking about? The study where they had brain electrodes already implanted in epilepsy patients awaiting surgery.

That one. Okay, um, these are the guys who showed it directly before I'd been observed. Its activity had been observed like the m R I. But m R has falling a little out of favor these days, and rightly, so we just didn't Yeah, right, um. These guys had brain electrodes hooked up to the brains of epilepsy patients already, and they're like, hey, let's test this out. So they had people watch others do grasping motions, and then they

had the people do grasping motions themselves. Some neurons were fired when the person to the grasp grasping motion himself, and other urons fired when they watched it, but eight percent fired both times. Those are the mirror neurons. It was the first time, the first time they were ever directly observed in humans. And those are the sine sinist you know, they're just they're just regular everyday people. Let's go back to that sports metaphor. Okay, okay, all right, Chuck,

have you ever seen somebody get hit by a pitch? Yeah, And did you recoil in your chair even though you're in no way in the line of that pitch a little bit. But have you seen other people do it? It's like, oh yeah, Like that's that's mirror neurons at work. You're anticipating that this other person is going to feel pain. You don't necessarily have to be a sinist for to have mirror neurons. You see what I'm saying. Yeah, although

in sinist it's just tightened. It's they're much more active, right, And that's the theory. Uh. They also found through that and I love this. This is like brand new stuff here in the past couple of years, which I really love. They found that it's you don't actually even have to see it. You can hear it, like a piece of

paper being torn, and they'll start firing like that. And when a Galassian Rizzolatti found that when they actually describe something happening in a sentence, the same mirror neurons are firing as if they are actually performing the action. So that's I don't know if that's getting through to people. The neurons at fire. If you would actually tear a piece of paper happened when you hear it being torn crazy.

It is crazy. Um. And you were talking about the what was the Italian guy's name who made the prediction that it was going to be the biggest thing since the Beatles? Uh Ravioli, Okay Ravioli. When he said, um, that it was gonna be huge, he was absolutely right, Chuck. Yes, mirror neurons are at the center of what's being called the Fifth Revolution and humanity. I believe it. Will you will you allow me? Will you indulge me a moment? So there's has been four so far, and we're at

the beginning of the fifth Revolution. The first revolution was Copernicus saying Earth is in at the center of the universe. The second revolution was Darwin saying men are just clever monkeys, even though he was seventy five years after what's his face? Yeah, what's his face? I know you're talking about. Oh yeah, um. And then the third revolution was Freudian who suggested that we were nothing but a bunch of drives and desires

that we were unconscious of and could control. The fourth was the genetic revolution, the d n A. Krick and Watson who showed like, hey, we're actually a bunch of genes and all that that implies, and Watson put it like there are only molecules. Everything else's sociology, and his his partner Francis Crick, said, huh, you know, that's really

interesting that we came up with that. I'm gonna go ahead and predict the fifth wave and the fifth Revolution is neuroscience and that's where we're at now, that we are nothing. But uh, this is how Crick put it in his book Astonishing Hypothesis. Even our loftiest thoughts and aspirations are mere byproducts of neural activity and mirror neurons are revealing that synesthesia reveals that. Because think about it, Chuck. If I watch you get pinched and I experienced the

pinching just like I'm being pinched, that's my reality. But it's not reality. Is everybody sees reality or agrees that reality is, but it's still just as real. So it kind of, um, it kind of underscores just how feeble reality actually is. And this is well, this is what neuroscience is. This fifth Revolution is undermining our conceptions and our perceptions of reality. Wow, I have a question for you.

There's a neuroscientist named vs. Ramash Chandron that's Okay, he has a question that he liked supposed to people, it's not his, but he bandies it about a lot. Chuck. Yes, if a neuroscientist could keep your brain in a vat of liquid and maintain your consciousness, so you had no idea.

You were just a brain and a vat of liquid, apply electrical impulses, so that could make you the happiest form of yourself, combined with Gandhi, Hugh Hefner, Um Einstein, and Bill Gates, and you were just as happy as you could be. And then one day the neuroscientist says to you, Hey, I'm gonna give you a choice. First of all, your brain in a vat of liquid, and all of your experiences are just me applying electrical impulses like Futurama or like the matrix, or like the matrix,

which was actually based on this this thought experiment. So you can either remain this happy eluded brain in this vet of liquid, or you can be your regular self, what you consider to be yourself, what you consider to be yourself right now, what would you choose? Blue pill or red pill? Basically, uh, I'd want to beat myself.

What's the difference? No, but really it's true. And this was around before the Warshinski brothers, you know, cinema whatever Lebaski, before they cinematized it as the basis for the matrix systems. This is a philosophical experiment and it well, if you would never know, you're right, what's the difference, right? But it's not. It's not never knowing, Chuck. The point is, that's what's going on with us right now. That's our conception of reality. It's just a it's a neurological response

to external stimuli. But that's that. None of it's real, And mirror neurons are kind of pointing that out as a big flashing light, like buddy, If somebody can feel someone else being hinched and you can actually see the brain activity going, they're not amaging it, then reality isn't real, right, And we're here to show you. Wow, I know I'm depressed. See I'm inspired. What does that say about us? I don't know. Yeah, that means we compliment each other. That

you blew my mind literally into next Wednesday. I got a couple of more things. I want to hear them. Uh, you know how I was talking about the biological basis for empathy. They're also thinking that this is why yawns are contagious, laughter contagious and moods or contagious good and bad. We didn't do that when the yawning contagious doesn't make you empathetic. I don't think they knew as much even when we recorded that as they do now about me or her. Yeah, like you were saying, like this is

cutting edge stuff. It's been advancing leaps and bounds, like over the last two years, right, leaps and bounds. And I got one more thing for you, speaking of that, have you seen that cute little lamb where's be the Confused Little Lamb on YouTube? No, but Cherry's like nodding like a year old adorable You mean, I just sit there and watch it like that. You'll you'll watch it ten times if that. As long as a little be

the lambs around, I don't care what's real. Yeah, I don't know if I could ever watch anything as much as I watched the Surprise cat kitten or the uh yeah, or the the shocked gopher groundhog or whatever they are around dramatic. Yeah, I can't remember what it's called. What about the weather guy? Pretty much everywhere. Arthur Arthur, Yeah, he was good too. Boy, that was a nice little sidebar. Have you seen Keyboard Kitty? We should just do a

whole show on YouTube stuff. I haven't seen keyboard Kitty. Uh Josh. Here's one of the one last thing. The mirror neurons. They think a more complex mirror neuron system developed in humans about five to ten thousand years ago. Yeah, I remember. You know what else happened around five to ten tho years ago. We I've got everything I want to say. I can't say. It emerged roughly at the

same time as modern communication and language beauty. So they think the mirror neurons, once they developed to that extent in early man, that crude pantomime gestures became more elaborate gestures, gestures. I'd like that. It's like a nod to just right. And then that became rudimentary language, and then it just snowballed from there. So we'll chuck think about this. We've talked about Mesopotamia being the cradle of civilization. We started

living in cities around that time too. Yeah, and mirror neurons make us more empathetic, which is pretty much the glue that holds society together truly. The Fifth Revolution so interesting. Um, we should give a shout out just so we don't get a thousand million emails about Richard Psytowick. He yeah, yeah, he kind of says that he's the man. He wrote a book in You noticed Oliver Sex nodding to this guy too, Yeah, he, I mean he seems like the

real deal. All that his website is m crude. Well, it's just you go to it and you're like, oh man, I thought you're all like it's professional and it's not dot org is it? But no, I don't think so. But he hasn't he he does have some books once

called The Man Who Tasted Shapes. Yeah, that's I think that's the one from And then Wednesday is Intogo Blue discovering the Brain of Synaesthesia, and he proposes that it's well, we should say, there was another hypothesis that it's just crossed wires, and that we're born like that with our neurons cross and that almost all humans get it straightened out and becomes more complex around twelve months of age. Yeah, but that it's just just wires across. That's why, baby,

if you stick your tongue out of a baby. They might stick their tongue out back. One other one, Yeah, we're talking about exo echo praxia in um the Turette's episode, and that apparently it has to do with mere neurons as well. Um. And then one other school of thought for synesthesia is that synists are picking up on something that's actually there, So, like the wavelength of a piece of music also has some sort of light wavelength. Interesting, I'm going with the mere neurons. Well, I don't think

we have any choice. Man, It's like evolution Freud. I don't know if I accept him as a revolution, but it's like evolution Copernicus. But don't you feel, Chuck that we are at this point where all the information is on the table, but we're just now starting to be able to put it together. So it's a really depressing point right now because our place in the universe is up in the airs. It's ever been, We've been, we're were, We've never been less sure about our importance or the

meaning of our lives. It's entirely possible that once we put it all together, the meaning will be even bleaker, the reality will be even bleaker. But then we'll be able to grow from there. I think that we exist right now in one of the bleakest periods of humankind. Wow, that's a nice way to leave things. Well, let's sit for a synesthesia. I think we've got more than just this one article on the site, but the one we were basing this off of is can people feel the

pain of others? I think if you type synesthesia s y N E S T h E S I A into the handy search bar how stuff works dot Com, you're gonna get something pal something, maybe d L hugely. We never can talk, so chuck. It means it's time for listener mail, right well, Josha Wood those listener mail, But I didn't prepare a listener mail today because we have just some things to talk about. T shirt submissions. Yeah, we've gotten some pretty cool ones. We've gotten some really

cool ones and something aren't so great. But but we appreciate the effort, yes we do, but keep them coming. We don't have the details. Yeah, we just wanted to say that we archive all emails. We archive all the emails. I have a little folder called t shirts and I'm throwing all the all the ones in there. That people send in. That's so crazy. I thought of making a folder called t shirt leave it to me. Uh, it's that we're really getting some great ones though. I would

want these t shirts. Oh there's one that I know we definitely can't produce that. I really want the magnum Pi one. Yeah. That was pretty dep Oh my goodness, pretty cool. All right? Well yeah, so that okay, that's coming, and then we should we should plug Facebook and Twitter too, because there we're up and running. Now. There's a social media site called Facebook that you should check out, and then there's another thing called Twitter that people should check

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thanks for everything we've gotten recently. Yeah, we got a six pack of micro brew from a guy that was really nice. And the people send us things. Uh about that work at sers we've got like hats and T shirts. Turns out nine one one isn't a joke. No, it's not. Well. Thank you everybody for listening, at least those of you send an emails double thanks, and those of you who

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