The Village Effect: How Face-to-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier and Happier (12 page)

But there’s something else too. Praying, chanting, singing, swaying, and rocking all together in the same room feel good; such coordinated social rituals are often the main event at religious gatherings. When I asked my friend Judy, a secular Jew, why she
attended synagogue, she told me that the rituals provided “a sense of community without talking.” They also prompt the release of serotonin, a neurotransmitter that regulates mood and digestion and plays a role in wound healing. Neurotransmitters released during such activities are why evolutionary anthropologist Lionel Tiger calls religious practice “brain-soothing.”
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They’re also infectious. If you’ve ever attended a religious service where you’re prompted to stand, sit, bow, kneel, sing, or clap in unison, you’ll know how viscerally persuasive it feels to be one of many—and how difficult it is to resist. Doing the wave at an arena or saluting the flag prompts similar feelings of unity.

If doing things together in the same room makes us feel like we’re being watched over and looked after and induces a sense of mutual trust, where does this shared influence begin?

EMOTIONAL CONTAGION

Genuine social contact can effectively rewire our brains and nudge us toward life-altering decisions. It turns out that it can also transmit deep-seated feelings such as joy, hostility, or shame, as well as thoughts and intentions. While language adds a layer of richness and clarity to our intentions, it’s not always required to get the message across. A glance lasting about twenty milliseconds is all I need to read whether my daughter is anxious or elated, and that brief glimpse helps me predict what is likely to happen next. I am her mother, after all, as well as a psychologist, but I can’t take much credit, given that monkeys can do this too.

In a classic experiment from the 1960s (which would never get past university research ethics committees today), University of Pittsburgh psychologist Robert E. Miller showed how attuned rhesus monkeys are to the expression of emotion in each other’s faces. He and his colleagues put two rhesus monkeys in separate rooms, connected by a window. The monkey in one room was taught to associate a clicking sound with an impending electric
shock. The monkey in the other room couldn’t hear the warning clicks, but he could see his buddy’s facial expression. During the short pause between click and shock, the observer monkey could disable the mechanism by pressing a lever, though his only clue as to what was coming was the anxious look on the face of his buddy. The researchers showed that the observer monkey very quickly learned to press the lever before they both got zapped. “Apparently, the monkey with the lever had no trouble reading the face of the one who could hear the warning,” writes primatologist Frans de Waal in
The Age of Empathy
, adding that “the monkey was better at reading the other’s expressions than the scientists.”
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EMOTIONAL CONTAGION STARTS WITH MIMICRY

It’s not terribly surprising that members of the same species are better able to read signs of impending danger in each other’s facial expressions and body language than other species that—if they could grasp their prey’s signals—might anticipate their next move and eat them for dinner. Animals that evolved the ability to read and act on subtle in-group cues would have stood a better chance of surviving and passing on their genes than those who were immune to such social signals. And on the predators’ side, any animal that could accurately decode another species’ movements and messages would have an advantage.

Despite a large frontal cortex that grants us outsized powers of imagination, reasoning, and communication, we are still largely at a disadvantage when it comes to understanding the instant messaging that goes on between members of other species. On a trip to Uganda in the summer of 2010, I observed several adolescent male wild chimps lolling near me in the shade of a tree in Kibale Park. One in particular drew my attention. He spent about twenty minutes scratching his armpits and crotch with his long, delicate fingers, not bothered at all by my presence. Then, without warning, an older male popped up about twenty yards away and started banging excitedly on
a tree trunk. At the sound, about a dozen other chimps materialized out of nowhere, and all of them—including my slacker—were suddenly galvanized into action. Within minutes a critical mass of males was hooting and banging on tree trunks in some crazy syncopated rhythm. The feverish cacophony electrified the damp forest air. Then, at some invisible signal (or at least invisible to me), they all galloped off excitedly after their leader into the pines.

It’s easy to anthropomorphize or to see other animals as our poor cousins, Commodore 64s to our iPads. Both assumptions are wrong. The idea that nonhuman animals are always less sophisticated than humans has been eclipsed by the past few decades of research on animals’ complex social lives, from apes to elephants, from spotted hyenas to ants. Referring to the baroque social signaling that guides the division of labor and sharing of resources in ant societies, the Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson once quipped that Karl Marx was right; he just applied his theory to the wrong species.

Adolescent male chimp in Kibale Forest National Park
. (Image and Figure Credits
3.1
)

According to Wilson and his co-author, Bert Hölldobler, in their 2009 book
The Superorganism
, there is no master plan in the brain of an ant, no blueprint of honeybee social order in the mind of the queen bee. Insects don’t reason. Nor do they plan—or follow others’ plans—for the future. “Instead, colony life is the product of self-organization,” in which each individual automatically follows specific behavioral algorithms based on environmental cues. For example, depending on how much nectar it’s found and how much help it has already recruited, a foraging honeybee flies back to the hive and communicates a status update by waggling figure eights on the walls. These torso wags map the exact location of a food
source in relation to the sun, as well as its precise distance from the hive. If there are not enough bees outside the hive to exploit the find, the forager bee adds flourishes such as grabbing a hive mate from above and shaking him all over. Not enough workers in-house to process the flood of incoming nectar? The bee will tremble while moving through the hive “with forelegs held aloft like Saint Vitus dancers,” write the entomologists. Signaling bees can also embellish a work order with rhythmic buzzing, more dynamic dance moves, and squirts of scent.

If that level of specificity—including an ability to remember where the flower with the sweetest nectar is in a row of identical-looking perennial beds—can exist in a brain the size of a pinhead, then it can’t be thinking about what symbols to communicate to its mates, any more than a motorist thinks about how she’ll drive home from work. She may be turning at the right intersections, dutifully stopping at stop signs and red lights, all the while accessing her mental road map, but, according to Wilson and Höldobler, she is “pondering neither the trip nor the operation of the automobile.”
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Like honeybees, humans respond to immediate biochemical and geographic cues that, despite being invisible, sway how they “decide” what they’ll do next.

MONKEY SEE, MONKEY DO: MIRROR NEURONS AND MIMICRY

That kind of automatic response is at the heart of the superorganism—an organic phenomenon created by dozens, if not hundreds, of leaderless individuals somehow acting in concert—whether in a beehive or the New York Stock Exchange. A similar lack of self-reflection characterizes one of the building blocks of human empathy: the mirror neuron system.

In the late eighties, mirror neurons were discovered by two Italian neurophysiologists, Giacomo Rizzolati and Vittorio Gallese. They were investigating how the neural circuits of the pre-motor
cortex register what happens before you execute a simple action, such as reaching for something you want to eat. If a tasty morsel—say, a piece of dark chocolate—was sitting on your desk within arm’s length and you finally decided to reach for it, which of the brain’s hundred billion neurons would become excited and light up right before you extended your arm? To answer that question, the scientists implanted electrodes in the pre-motor cortices of macaques so they could see which neural area became activated when the monkeys prepared to grab something.
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Then their most remarkable finding surfaced, completely by accident.

The day it happened, one of the electrode-implanted macaques was sitting on a chair in Gallese’s lab watching the scientist move around. When Gallese reached for something, he suddenly heard an explosive crackling on the computer connected to the monkey’s brain. “It signalled a discharge from the pertinent cell in area F5,” recalled a colleague, Marco Iacoboni. “The monkey was just sitting quietly, not intending to grasp anything, yet this neuron affiliated with the grasping action had fired nonetheless.” Other colleagues in the lab were able to provoke a similar reaction in the area of the brain specialized for grasping, lifting, or tearing things. Simply picking up a peanut or an ice cream cone elicited the same excited response in the monkey’s pre-motor cortex, even though the animal was just sitting there, watching the experimenters.
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The discovery of mirror neurons—motor cells that fire when
someone else
moves—added a new twist to the idea of passive observation. Here, then, was the neural hardware underlying all sorts of unconscious contagion, from the way people reflexively flinch when they see that someone is about to get smacked, to the way a tennis player’s arm tenses when he watches another athlete prepare his swing. Mirror neurons aren’t helping you
imagine
how it feels; they’re literally putting you through the paces.

This mirroring happens even when you’re watching the action on a screen—or, rather, broadcast on your goggles—as Iacoboni
discovered when he collaborated with an adman to test people’s neural reactions to Super Bowl commercials. When Iacoboni and his team projected the ads while subjects were in the scanner, their mirror neuron systems became activated. It was not so much the actors’ gestures that elicited a response, Iacoboni suggests, but the degree to which a test subject identified with the particular actor on the screen.
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Though the automatic nature of mirror neurons doesn’t account for more shaded forms of empathy, such as feeling someone’s psychological pain, the discovery of mirror neurons went a long way toward explaining many of our everyday experiences. People unconsciously use a more halting rhythm of speech when they’re chatting with someone who stutters, and adjust their posture to mirror the stance of the person they’re talking to. In a face-to-face conversation, when one person crosses his arms, usually the other follows suit. And as anyone in a lecture or symphony audience knows, yawning, scratching, and coughing are also contagious.
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Some studies have even shown greater electrical activity in parts of the body of a person directly observing an action performed by someone else: the lips of a person listening to someone stutter showed greater electrical activity than the lips of someone who couldn’t hear the stutter, even though the observer’s lips weren’t moving; people watching an arm-wrestling tournament had increased electrical activity in their biceps even though they weren’t wrestling themselves.
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Not only that, but when people are interacting face-to-face, unconscious mimicry elicits emotions that grease the wheels of social interaction. Studies by MIT’s Sandy Pentland and his team have shown that the more people mirror each other in conversation, the more they say they trust each other. To measure how synchronized people were, the researchers used a sensor they’d designed called a sociometer, which is the size of an iPhone and is worn around the neck like a conference nametag. The device measures
the back-and-forth nonverbal interaction within groups, such as reciprocal smiling and head nods. Pentland and his colleague Jared Curhan used the sociometer to show that the more verbal mimicry there was between a manager and a boss in the first five minutes of salary negotiations, the more satisfied the two felt about the discussion, and the more generous the negotiated package. Unconscious mimicry—including quick vocal blips such as “Okay?” “Okay!”—was associated with a 20 to 30 percent increase in salary and benefits for the new hire.
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Restaurant wait staff also benefit from social mimicry. You’re likely to tip a waiter an average of 140 percent more if he repeats your food order verbatim than if he just paraphrases what you want.
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This type of unconscious imitation hints at how much our “thinking” hinges on face-to-face contact.

ANIMAL SYNCHRONY

My son Eric, a keen birdwatcher, once described seeing a single sandpiper on a Cape Cod beach abruptly look up. The whole flock followed suit within milliseconds. Like a mob of tiny tourists staring at a Manhattan skyscraper, they all tipped up their heads because one did it first. Then the flock mysteriously rose into the air and fell again as one unit, responding to some silent signal of alarm that only one of them had seen.
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Such synchrony is familiar to snorkelers, who can spook thousands of fish with a tiny tip of a flipper, and to those who herd mammals, which, whether munching on grass or trading stocks, often act in concert. The singing of blue whales off Half Moon Bay, south of San Francisco, for example, coalesces into a single frequency of sixteen hertz, according to physicist Roger Bland. After analyzing 4,300 recordings, Bland observed that the whales are “like a choir singing together, mutually tuning in to the same frequency.”
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