Reflective behavior

Karma

Cause & Effect

You reap what you sow

What goes around comes around

Be the change you want to see in the world

Do unto others as you would like others to do unto you

There’s a lot of good advice out there about how to live one’s life and to assure it will be happy, healthy and trouble-free.  The ideas above could be summarized as Newton’s third law: for every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction. But we could also say, for every action there’s a reaction and a co-action.   When we watch someone else’s actions, we observe them and react to them, but our brains also respond as if we’re doing the action ourselves. This is down to “mirror neurons”.

Mirroring Behavior

Mirror neurons are neurons that fire when we do something and when we watch someone else do something. If I smile, parts of my brain are activated. If I see you smile, some of the same parts are activated. If I read the word “smile”, those same parts aren’t activated – mirror neurons are responding to the action, not the concept. This effect can be exceptionally strong: if I see you doing something, I may even get a false memory of doing it myself!

Until recently, researchers have found these neurons in animals, including primates, but only guessed that they’re in people too.  Now, researchers believe they’ve found direct evidence of mirror neurons in humans.

Mirror neurons seem to be the key to huge swathes of human behavior.  They will “do for psychology what DNA did for biology” wrote V.S. Ramachandran, the acclaimed neuroscientist. They offer us insight into how we learn, empathy and compassion, theory of mind, imitation, and collective behavior, to name a few.

Collective Behavior

 Collective behavior is a social process or event which doesn’t go according to existing social structures (laws, conventions, institutions, and so forth) but which appear to happen spontaneously.  Christmas dinner, for instance, will have a set pattern in each house, part of a larger social pattern; the public response to Diana’s death in 1999, on the other hand, was spontaneous and even out of character for the British.

Traditionally, collective behavior in sociology includes the crowd, the public, the mass, and the social movements which creating behaviors like rumors, riots, trends, and fads – from broken windows at a demonstration to the popularity of a sneezing panda.  We see collective behavior every day of our lives, from the rumors that fly around the office to extreme change in fashion trends we experienced in our lifetime. (So yes, we can blame collective behavior for bell-bottom jeans in the 70s, women’s shoulder pad in the 80s, and the parachute pants of the 90s!)

Reflective Behavior

Let’s take this mirroring of actions and emotions a step further by looking at the advice listed at the top of the page.  Each piece of advice claims that whatever you put out will be mirrored back to you.  That if you behave badly, and exhibit negative emotion, it will be mirrored back to you and negative things will happen to you.  If you show evil intentions and exhibit hatred in your heart, eventually evil and hatred will be reflected back to you – what the Buddhists call “Karma”, what the Bible describes as “you reap what you sow”. It may be that mirror neurons explain neurologically how our behavior takes on a life beyond us, rippling outwards. This can be extremely negative, as with the bystander effect, but it can also be a powerful good. (By the way, new research shows that the bystander effect is not as bad as we thought – we are more likely to help each other than not.)

Good Behavior

The beauty of mirror neurons and collective behavior is they can also be used for good. When I see you smile, part of my brain experiences that smile as if it were my own. When I see your act of kindness to someone, part of me experiences that act of kindness too. One person intelligently breaking the bystander effect can galvanize an entire crowd.  And this also has implications for creating heaven on earth by December 21^st, 2012.  Part of the strategy to create heaven on earth is to use collective intelligence (internet and social media) to create a collective conscious thought, “to love one another”, to people around the world.  When people begin to act on this conscious thought, mirror neurons kick in and create collective behavior. This, in turn, can create a critical mass, to create heaven on earth.

Every act of kindness you perform, every smile you give, every skill you use in front of someone else, takes on a life beyond your own, in other people’s minds. The enormous power that mirror neurons is the power to do good, for our actions to be larger than themselves.