7: Marco Iacoboni
Welcome to Episode 7, where Professor MARCO IACOBONI and I talk about the mirroring, mirror neurons, the science of empathy, and how we understand the minds of others. Marco is Professor of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, where he directs the Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Laboratory within the Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center. Marco has written volumes of vitally important scientific papers, including a very famous paper published in the journal Science back in 1999 called Cortical Mechanisms of Human Imitation. But Marco has also written a fantastic, highly readable book for the general public that I recommend to anyone interested in the human mind generally, and human empathy more specifically. This book is called MIRRORING PEOPLE: THE NEW SCIENCE OF HOW WE CONNECT WITH OTHERS, and, as I said, it is excellent. I’m not the only one who thinks so. Check this out: “Those of us who thirty years ago began to speculate about the social brain never guessed what riches were in store. Iacoboni's book is both a thrilling account of how research on mirror neurons is revolutionising our understanding of inter-subjectivity, and a passionate manifesto for what he calls ‘existential neuroscience.’ Mirroring People does for the story of mirror neurons what The Double Helix did for DNA.” —Nicholas Humphrey, author of Seeing Red: A Study in Consciousness As enjoyable as Marco is in Episode 7, I wish all my listeners could spend some actual time with him. Marco Iacoboni is one of he friendliest, optimistic, and open-minded folks you’re likely to meet. I feel very lucky indeed to count him as a friend. Thanks for the great conversation, Marco! * * * As always, remember that this podcast is brought to you by VQR and the Center for Media and Citizenship. Plus, we're a member of the TEEJ.FM podcast network. AND... The music of CIRCLE OF WILLIS was composed and performed by Tom Stauffer, Gene Ruley and their band THE NEW DRAKES. You can purchase this music at their Amazon page.
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Jim Coan
From VQR and the Center for Media and Citizenship, this is episode seven of Circle of Willis where I chat with neuroscientist and neurologist Marco Iacoboni about his experience as being at the center of the emerging science of what Marco calls: mirroring. Marco's work helps us understand how we empathize with others and may even yield some clues about what constitutes the self.
Jim Coan
Hey everyone! It's Jim Coan. This is my podcast Circle of Willis. Thanks for being here at the end of a busy semester. I'm not sorry to see it go. I love everybody that I worked with, all the students but it's always a good time of year when you enter the holiday, the holiday part. The holiday part is here! And I'm happy about it. Okay, look, in this episode I'm chatting with Marco Iacoboni, who's one of my favorite people on the planet. And who in my own informal poll has one of the one of science's most enjoyable names to say out loud. Try it out: Iacoboni. It's a good one. Mark is one of those... he's an MD, PhD. He's one of those guys, because he's a neurologist and a neuroscientist. Currently, Marco is a professor of psychiatry and bio behavioral sciences at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, which is, of course, the University of California at Los Angeles, which is on fire, as I record this, and I'm really sad about that. I love LA. One of those people that loves LA. Love California. I hope those fires get taken care of soon and I'm thinking of all my friends out there who might be affected negatively by that.
Jim Coan
Now, Marco at UCLA, Marc is also the director of the Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Laboratory, which is a place within the Edmonson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center, whew. That's a lot of places, UCLA is busy, lots going on there, and Marco is in the center of all of it. And he's been in the center of things for a long time. In the late 1990s and early aughts, Marco sort of became famous for his work on mirror neurons, as we talked about it at the time. These are the neurons in the brain that become active not only when you do something like I don't know, like grab a tomato or something. But also when you see someone else doing that thing. The idea is that the sort of coupling between enacting a behavior, doing something, and observing that same behavior, that coupling in the brain, that may be a large part of how we understand the experiences and even the intentions of others. And it might actually underlie how we empathize with others. Now, Marco would probably say he studies the mirroring system, or the mirroring behavior of the brain more broadly. Because unlike some scientists working in this area, he doesn't really study the activity of specific neurons themselves, but rather, the behavior of millions of neurons activating simultaneously. And he does that using brain imaging technology, like PET imaging, or fMRI. And more recently, he's been studying not only how our brains mirror the behaviors of others, but also how we control that mirroring how our brains work to sort of keep the mirroring we do from sort of running amok and causing us to simulate just about everything we see. And it turns out that control is pretty important, too. We'll talk about that a little bit in our conversation. In the process of doing all this, of course, Marco has written volumes of important scientific papers, including a very famous one published in the Journal of Science back in 1999 or so, I think that was what it was, called Cortical Mechanisms of Human Imitation. And this paper's sort of part of the DNA of the scientific study of empathy and human social cognition these days. So that's good. But Marco has also written a fantastic and really highly readable, really relatable book for the general public that I recommend strongly to anyone interested in the human mind generally, and anyone interested in human empathy, more specifically. This book is called Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect With Others. And as I said, it's excellent. I encourage you to go get it and read it. All right? There are a lot of things... There's just so many things I want to say about Marco. I like to talk about people. And I want to talk more about Marco but I'm kind of, conscious of the fact that as I go on and on with these opening monologues and introductions, it keeps you from the actual man himself, keeps you from the conversation. So, I want to get through this, but I do want to say, look, I met Marco, I guess for the first time in the Netherlands, I think, two or three years ago, at a conference, we were both attending. And I and I instantly, instantly liked him very much because he's funny, and warm, and friendly. And up for discussing just about anything. From neuroscience, to culture, to art, and you know, existential philosophy which by the way, Marco and I seem to end up talking about nearly every time we get a chance to chat with each other I don't really know what that's about but, in fact, Marco often reminds me of this great picture. I posted this on my Twitter page for Circle of Willis a couple days ago. This great picture I once saw of the existentialist, Albert Camus, in this in this really great suit, and he's dancing while smoking a cigarette. And somehow that blend of existential awareness and dancing and smoking, that blend of thinking and recreating goes a long way towards summarizing Marco's personality for me. And so, that's maybe an efficient way to describe what Marco was like, in addition to his prodigious scientific output. All right, I could go on and on with stuff like this, but I really don't want to keep you waiting any longer for the man himself. So friends and acquaintances and people who I have no idea who you are, here's my friend, Marco Iacoboni. I hope you have as much fun with him as I did.
Jim Coan
So good to see you, man.
Marco Iacoboni
Good to see you too.
Jim Coan
Here in DC. That's kind of neat.
Marco Iacoboni
Yeah. Last time we were in the Netherlands.
Jim Coan
Netherlands. Right. That was what? Two years ago?
Marco Iacoboni
Two years ago. Two and a half.
Jim Coan
Let me start at the beginning. I want to ask you, I've never really asked you the question of where, you know, what sort of what your story is? You got educated in Italy undergrad?
Marco Iacoboni
Yeah. Back in Italy.
Jim Coan
You're from Rome.
Marco Iacoboni
Rome. Yeah.
Jim Coan
Geez that's so incredibly romantic.
Marco Iacoboni
I know.
Jim Coan
My life sucks. I wish I was from Rome. I'm from Silver Spring.
Marco Iacoboni
I don't even know where that is.
Jim Coan
Of course you don't! It's suburb of DC. From Rome. That's awesome. What part of Rome? You were like born in the Trevi Fountain or something?
Marco Iacoboni
A fountain. Like a newborn.
Jim Coan
Yeah. So you're from Rome. That's your hometown.
Marco Iacoboni
My hometown. I was there and like, a week ago, and it's a beautiful city still. I love it. Rome by night blows my mind.
Jim Coan
I still have never been.
Marco Iacoboni
Well You should go.
Jim Coan
I know. I should go. Now.
Marco Iacoboni
You should go now.
Jim Coan
Yeah, yeah. Befor a die.
Marco Iacoboni
Hopefully, you're not gonna die anytime soon.
Jim Coan
Why do you bring this out of me? All right. So you're from Rome and you went to school in Rome?
Marco Iacoboni
I went to school in Rome. I went to medical school over there. Then my first classroom there, physiology, I fell in love with the brain. I wanted to study the brain. And immediately we don't have an MD PhD program combined. So I was also a specialist in neurology, but I felt I needed to have a stronger formal teaching in neuroscience. So I got a PhD in neuroscience too while I was there in Rome.
Jim Coan
Just along the way?
Marco Iacoboni
Along the way. I was seeing patients as a neurologist, and-
Jim Coan
Did you have kids or anything like that at the time?
Marco Iacoboni
That's, that takes...
Jim Coan
Some more time available to you to get a PhD and an MD in neurophysiology, neuroscience, neurology.
Marco Iacoboni
Yeah, well, I was inpatient still. And that's actually what led me to come here because it's part of my neuroscience PhD, I wanted to also get an experience abroad in a different lab. I got a little fellowship from an Italian funding agency, to go to work with .. He's a psychologist that started with Roger Sperry with two hemispheres. And he's a lovely guy. I still love him and we then work together.
Jim Coan
That's terrific. And where was that?
Marco Iacoboni
It was 1992.
Jim Coan
That was in 1992. But where? Where was thatat?
Marco Iacoboni
Still UCLA.
Jim Coan
Still at UCLA. Okay.
Jim Coan
In 92.
Marco Iacoboni
I wanted to do that. And I knew that on campus, there was this other guy, ... was one of the godfathers of brain imaging. And I wanted to do that, too. So I started with .... And then I contacted ..., and I started working with them.
Marco Iacoboni
92 93.
Jim Coan
How about that? So did you like LA right away?
Marco Iacoboni
No, initially, I was a little shocked.
Jim Coan
What were you shocked by?
Marco Iacoboni
It's so spread out. It's so different from I mean, the layout,.
Jim Coan
That's right? You can't really... it's not a walking city, so much.
Marco Iacoboni
Well, although now I walk from my house to my office every day. So you can.
Jim Coan
I know rub it in. Actually, I do too. I do through the sleet and rain.
Marco Iacoboni
I feel for you. My empathy.
Jim Coan
Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Mirroring. So were you... what was the state of your science at that time?
Marco Iacoboni
Well, at that time, I was just at the beginning. I was just figuring out what I wanted to do. One thing that really interested me from the very beginning, as an observing neurologist, and as a resident in neurology, I was seeing a lot of patients with stroke. In the early hours after the stroke. Our group back in the 80s was the first group that studied within six hours, stroke patients doing angiography doing CT those days we did MRI.
Jim Coan
Right, right.
Marco Iacoboni
To figured out, you know, how to treat the patients very, very soon, which is a concept that is still valid now.
Jim Coan
Yeah, that's right. So Wow. So you start making your mark, really doing that.
Marco Iacoboni
And by seeing the deficits of these patients I realize that the big thing in the brain is really how the brain puts together perception and action. And that started the whole thing. And so I started looking into that and wanted to study that. I was already in LA when I run into Rizzolatti, in 95, in the middle of Prague. And they had just made the discovery of mirror cells.
Marco Iacoboni
So yeah, that was really, really brand new. Yeah, the major-
Jim Coan
Rizzolatti and he's such an interesting guy.
Marco Iacoboni
He is a lovely guy.
Jim Coan
Great guy.
Marco Iacoboni
It's like, you know...
Jim Coan
He's hilarious. And he's just, I don't know, I'm going to say something just deeply offensive now. He's just so Italian!
Marco Iacoboni
He's very Italian
Jim Coan
Is that offensive? It's so true.
Marco Iacoboni
He's also, yeah, I mean, the way he drives? You should see the way he drives. He's so aggressive.
Jim Coan
So you meet him in Prague.
Marco Iacoboni
I meet him in Prague, he tells me about this stuff. I find it interesting. He wants to do some brain imaging on the side. And I was already...
Jim Coan
Because he's doing single cells stuff.
Marco Iacoboni
He was doing single cell. Now he's doing everything. I mean, now, he's kind of almost retired, but because of his fame he's collaborating with all sorts of people doing all sorts of things.
Jim Coan
Right, right.
Marco Iacoboni
But at that time, they wanted really to expand and do also brain imaging in humans. And that's the way he started.
Jim Coan
So he's... just to orient people who might be listening Rizzolatti and...
Marco Iacoboni
Gallese?
Jim Coan
Gallese and some others, they start observing that it was in primates and monkeys. When some are doing an action, you get activity in these bundles of cells in the cortex. And when they're observing the same action taken by another monkey, those same cells activate. And this was an enormous news flash. I remember everybody, I was in graduate school at the time, and everybody just was shitting their pants because this now, we had a neural substrate. A real mechanism for at least at the time, we thought for empathy, and understanding of intention and observational learning. Modeling, right?
Marco Iacoboni
But he wasn't, I mean, now you we tell the story like you know, they see the phenomenon. I mean, they didn't look for it, but they found it and realized later. But the idea that some motor cells, cells as the control your muscles.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Marco Iacoboni
Can respond to the side of someone else making the same action was so outrageous at that time.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Marco Iacoboni
They took them a long time to convince themselves that we were not seeing an artifact.
Jim Coan
Al Kaszniak. And so yeah, this hit like an explosion.
Marco Iacoboni
Of course.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Marco Iacoboni
And Galleze became famous going to that conference.
Jim Coan
Oh, is that right?
Jim Coan
Well, that's, that's appropriate, I guess if it's a pretty spec- Because I remember when we first started talking about it, I was at University of Arizona, and there's a center there for consciousness studies. There was lots of you know, how do we know another mind? You know, all these kinds of questions were going on and David Chalmers was there.
Marco Iacoboni
Yeah.
Marco Iacoboni
Yeah, he told me this story.
Jim Coan
The consciousness conference?
Marco Iacoboni
Yeah, he say that he told me the whole story. He submitted.
Jim Coan
I must have been there.
Marco Iacoboni
98 it was 98.
Jim Coan
Oh yeah, I was definitely there.
Marco Iacoboni
I also met at that conference, I met Alvin Goldman. And I started working...
Jim Coan
Oh, yeah.
Marco Iacoboni
Their paper on tricks. On mind reading.
Jim Coan
Mind reading!
Marco Iacoboni
But the story was that he wasn't even going there. Because they wanted him to present a poster. And he said, I'm not gonna go to a...
Jim Coan
I'm not printing a poster.
Marco Iacoboni
But apparently someone withdrew. They were supposed to talk and they gave him the in order to pay for him.
Jim Coan
They flew him out.
Marco Iacoboni
And then all of a sudden, everybody gets on fire with mirror neurons.
Jim Coan
They sure did. Wow, that's so interesting. I didn't realize I mean, I guess... I mean, I don't know if I really remember this or not. But now that you're telling it, it seems like I do. But I remember that jolt in graduate school because I was right there. I was in Tucson for that conference and while all those people were organizing all of that stuff.
Marco Iacoboni
And also Rama Chandra helped a lot because he started making a big deal about mirror neurons.
Jim Coan
Yeah, that's right. In John Cacioppo, I remember was very, very excited about that and was talking a lot- at least talking about it everywhere.
Marco Iacoboni
Yeah. I mean, for about 10 years, the media was in love with mirror neurons.
Jim Coan
Yeah. And we've had some backlash, haven't we?
Marco Iacoboni
Yeah.
Jim Coan
We can talk about that in a minute. But first, when you're talking with Rizzolatti, about the mirror neuron phenomenon, you're discussing the possibility of doing this as a brain imaging.
Marco Iacoboni
That's right. Well the problem that we had is, of course, with brain imaging, you can't look at individual firing pattern. And actually, you know that your signal is just the mix of... it's an indirect signals that comes from...
Jim Coan
It's blood flow. It's not even neural activity.
Marco Iacoboni
Any response of millions of cells.
Jim Coan
Yes. Right.
Marco Iacoboni
So how do you do a study like that?
Jim Coan
Yeah, that seems complicated.
Marco Iacoboni
It was.
Jim Coan
So Marco, how do you do it? You're the man.
Marco Iacoboni
So the way we deal with it, well, first of all, let's think of the functionality of this system. What can it do? One thing it can do, if you have some areas of the brain that fire up when you make an action, when you see someone else making an action, those regions must be involved in imitation. Imitation is such a big deal in human behavior. And yet, at the time, no one had done a single study using brain imaging to study imitation.
Marco Iacoboni
Right.
Marco Iacoboni
So I thought, well, first of all, let's do an imitation paradigm. Let's have some nice control conditions. Let's make some predictions. And hopefully, the predictions that we make, when it comes to areas that should be mirroring, are also kind of anatomically compatible with the areas in which the...
Jim Coan
The motor cortex?
Marco Iacoboni
Right. With some motor signals.
Jim Coan
Yeah, yes.
Marco Iacoboni
And that's what, I mean, those were sort of loose, but in a way was the best we could do at that.
Jim Coan
So what was the the original study? What did you actually do?
Marco Iacoboni
They were just outsiders. Just imitating very silly finger movements.
Jim Coan
So you're lifting up. But you know what, I love that! I actually give that example.
Marco Iacoboni
Because it's a very simple study.
Jim Coan
It's so simple. That's why you know, the thing is about brain imaging, it's that if you get at all too complex-
Marco Iacoboni
Right.
Jim Coan
In your contrast, then you've got multiple potential interpretations of any given contrast.
Marco Iacoboni
But the funny thing is that we're using these very simple stimuli, which is just the hand lifting a finger. And yet at that time, there were so little- Now we're doing all sorts of wild stuff. We are showing movies.
Jim Coan
Right, right. Right, right.
Marco Iacoboni
And those days, people were so much controlling what they were trying to do in terms of activation that I remember, a grad student of the Brain Mapping Center, gets into the scanner, I mean in the control room, while I'm doing subjects, and sees my little hand moving the fingers, and he looks at it. Oh, that's a very interesting stimulus! In those days, you were doing like...
Jim Coan
Because you can see the hand and the finger. But I think that's appropriate. I mean, I think that was especially, you know, it was even then still a pretty new technology. I mean, you were really at the ground level.
Marco Iacoboni
Yeah.
Jim Coan
You know, with fMRI. And you had done PET stuff before that.
Marco Iacoboni
And then by then, there was the paper we published on science and imitation of this little finger movements was actually my very first fMRI study.
Jim Coan
Is that right? Man.
Marco Iacoboni
It was so smooth. I mean...
Jim Coan
It was great. That was great, great work. Dynamite work. I mean that's like a piece of DNA that has spawned 1000s of other studies.
Marco Iacoboni
I'm glad you say that I still have that paper.
Jim Coan
It's really true.
Marco Iacoboni
I mean, sometimes you read the paper that you've written, years ago, and you'd say, Well, I would change this. I would change that. That paper, I wouldn't change a word.
Jim Coan
That's great. Well, it's a beautiful paper. And I think you should be really proud of it.
Marco Iacoboni
I am. Still my most cited paper.
Jim Coan
Yeah, sure. Sure. So what happens ? So you do this study. You send it to Science.
Marco Iacoboni
I do the study in March and analyze the data in May. I give a seminar, a local seminar because I wanted to figure out my own data. In the summer, write the paper, and in December it's published in Science.
Jim Coan
Every now and then I have this experience. It's almost like flow for scientists. Like you get the idea. You just know this idea is the right idea. And you do the study and everything seems to fall into place beautifully. Like suddenly discovering you can dance or something.
Marco Iacoboni
I can tell you one thing. I mean, maybe just postdocs have a delusion that they have but, I remember I've had this feeling. I mean, you never know when your paper gets published in any journal, but especially in journal like Science. And yet, when I sent that paper, I thought, I think these paper get a chance.
Jim Coan
Do it. Yeah, you know, I know what you're talking about. I published a lot of papers as have you. And there are certain papers where I very distinctly remember feeling like, Oh, yeah, this is the one. This is going to be...
Marco Iacoboni
It's a good one.
Jim Coan
This is going to be a really good one.
Marco Iacoboni
Yeah.
Jim Coan
And I don't know exactly why it happens with some papers and not with others. I have been surprised in the past. But not that often. I sort of know which papers are the good ones.
Marco Iacoboni
To me that happened at least a couple of other times. One was that after we started this work on imitation, someone sent me a paper by Shatrughan and John Barge, showing that people that tend to imitate automatically other people, they also tend to be empathic, more empathic.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Marco Iacoboni
And so I started really to need to link immitation and empathy. So we did this study that we published in PNS with a lot of also media coverage.
Jim Coan
Right, right.
Marco Iacoboni
Subjects are immitating or watching facial expression. And we showed this circuitry between mirror areas, the insula, the amygdala.
Jim Coan
Yeah, yeah.
Marco Iacoboni
And I remember the New York Times covered it using one of the famous phrases of Bill Clinton, I feel your pain, I really do.
Jim Coan
Right, because you're implicating insula.
Marco Iacoboni
So that was the other one that when I sent it to PNS I thought this has a good chance of getting there. And then the one on the intention.
Jim Coan
When was the PNS paper? It was hard to say PNS.
Marco Iacoboni
I know.
Jim Coan
I keep feeling compelled to say penis.
Marco Iacoboni
2003, four years after the Science paper.
Jim Coan
2003. Okay. Also still pretty early.
Marco Iacoboni
Yeah. I mean, we had a 10 year run in which everything we're doing was like gold.
Jim Coan
Yeah. You know, some people complain about that. But I don't I think it's appropriate.
Marco Iacoboni
About what?
Jim Coan
About the, you know, the sort of all the MRI studies in the late 90s, early aughts that were going into these high powered journals. Because you know, what, are they really that good? Look, this was a new method that was giving us unprecedented access to the invivo functioning brain. I mean almost anything, would have been science worthy.
Marco Iacoboni
I agree.
Jim Coan
The fact that you were doing that work-
Marco Iacoboni
At that time it was particularly...
Jim Coan
It was profound.
Marco Iacoboni
Yeah, I agree. And also, for the first time, we were showing that neuroscience can actually do stuff that is relevant to the lives of other people.
Jim Coan
Right, which, you know, who knew that could be true.
Marco Iacoboni
So that was good. That was a nice 10 run that led me to actually write the whole book about the story because it was a nice science story. It was telling me that I'd been told for many years, that we are selfish beings. And actually, what I was seeing with my studies that humans actually wired for empathy, we're actually good people.
Jim Coan
Wired for empathy. We almost can't help it.
Marco Iacoboni
Yeah, exactly. Well, and then we learned how to be unempathic I think that's my theory at this point that when we grow up, we actually use all our caring for...
Jim Coan
We grow wiser. More discerning.
Marco Iacoboni
More controlled.
Jim Coan
More controlled. Yes. So last time, we were tracking you in terms of where you are, was 92 year. You're there on a postdoc. And then you meet, you know, Rizzolatti and all this stuff. But when do you start your job? Your actual faculty position at UCLA?
Marco Iacoboni
Well, I was for many years, I was a bit ambivalent. I used to still have Rome and I wanted to go back to Rome. But I was living in this incredible city, but also, I was also in this incredible lab. And so I was looking, you know, here and there. And I didn't get really nice offer until of course, you know, the, you're an academic too. The Italians making me a good offer. And I'm telling John Mazziotta...
Jim Coan
Right, you have to have the competing offer.
Marco Iacoboni
Yeah, I told Mazziotta, I'm gonna go.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Marco Iacoboni
And he says, No, you stay.
Jim Coan
We'll let you work in the mines until you have another offer. And then we'll think about it.
Marco Iacoboni
Yeah. So that's the way it works. I mean, basically I started with my official position as a professor in 99.
Jim Coan
Yeah. So you were doing all this amazing stuff all the way through there.
Marco Iacoboni
Actually, the paper also came out. The Science paper came out in 99 and so everything was actually falling in the right place at the right time.
Jim Coan
Well, man, I tell you a UCLA is such an incredible department. And the resources there are amazing. The city, you get the Pacific Ocean, right there. It's a sweet deal. Yeah, Sir.
Marco Iacoboni
The Brain Mapping Center is also fun.
Jim Coan
The Brain Mapping Center. So tell me about the Brain Mapping Center.
Marco Iacoboni
It's a small building, but everything I mean, my office is there. I get out of the office and I have like 30 yards from my TMS lab. 50 yards for the premium scanner with HCP sequences.
Jim Coan
Man, I want to come and visit sometime.
Marco Iacoboni
You should come and visit.
Jim Coan
Yeah, really, I'd love to do that.
Marco Iacoboni
I have to invite you to a seminar.
Jim Coan
Yeah. So the brain imaging lab, was that there when you started?
Marco Iacoboni
It was sort of there. I mean, there was a division.
Jim Coan
It wasn't really a center the way it is now.
Marco Iacoboni
No. We opened the center officially in 1998. But for few years, we had the scanner 3D scanner, it was a G scanner at the time. It was built. And there was nothing. I mean, basically was just the scanner.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Marco Iacoboni
And then they we build the building around it.
Jim Coan
Yeah, just shielding around the scanner. An old tarp for keeping rain off.
Marco Iacoboni
Yeah. So I was doing a little bit of PET in those years. But then when we got the scanner, I started doing fMRI. but many...
Jim Coan
fMRIs better. It's totally... it's way easier. It's better. It's easier on subjects.
Jim Coan
You get so many more data points.
Jim Coan
You get far more data. Yeah,
Marco Iacoboni
I love it. I mean there's problems with it but...
Jim Coan
Sure. Sure.
Marco Iacoboni
Still.
Jim Coan
But we can overcome those because we're so clever.
Marco Iacoboni
And what I'm doing now is also to use a lot of neuromodulation techniques like TMS.
Jim Coan
Right. Yeah. And I want to talk to you about that. But first, I want to talk about the book.
Marco Iacoboni
Mirroring People.
Jim Coan
And so everybody buy Mirroring People. So where does the idea for the- Well, first of all, actually, I want to even back up a little bit from that. Because when I think about the years that you're starting to publish these papers, and I am aware of them, I'm doing neurophyis and clinical psych at Arizona with all the consciousness crowd and my mentor, John Allen, and the mirror neurons phenomenon just explodes. And everybody's obsessed with them.
Marco Iacoboni
Yeah.
Jim Coan
And then suddenly, there starts to be this like
Marco Iacoboni
Backlash.
Jim Coan
What is this, really? Right? What is this, really? But before we even get to the backlash, what I want to hear about is what is your experience? Yeah, I mean, I sort of wonder about people like you in the sense that you were internationally at the center of this explosive moment.
Marco Iacoboni
The biggest story in neuroscience.
Jim Coan
The biggest story in neuroscience. What was that like for you?
Marco Iacoboni
It was good.
Jim Coan
You're not very neurotic are you?
Marco Iacoboni
Not at all.
Jim Coan
Oh, that's a great gift. You should thank your mother. Call your mother and say, Thank you for not making me neurotic.
Marco Iacoboni
Yeah. I mean, of course, my mother is the classical Italian mother. So it can be also a pain in the ass.
Jim Coan
Okay, well, fair enough. But so you were just it was really a nice time.
Marco Iacoboni
It was a nice time. It was fun. I mean, sometimes you have q little even too many requests for media.
Jim Coan
Yeah, sure.
Marco Iacoboni
You know, say things that Well, I wouldn't necessarily write that. But what scientists don't understand is that if I'm a politician, and a reporter covers what I'm doing.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Marco Iacoboni
You don't want the politician to cross check what the reporter says.
Jim Coan
That's right. That's right.
Marco Iacoboni
Scientists do same thing. I mean, after all, the journalist is free to write whatever.
Jim Coan
Right, right, right, right. Right.
Marco Iacoboni
But scientists don't get it. If the the article in the media is not as precise or analyst what we write in scientific papers, then they attribute to you.
Jim Coan
Yeah, they'd say, You messed it up.
Marco Iacoboni
Yeah, exactly. Which is ridiculous.
Jim Coan
Of course. Of course. Yeah. There's this new, Alan Alda has this new - the actor - has this new center at Stonybrook. Yeah, probably for Frontiers. And...
Marco Iacoboni
For one of the PBS shows.
Jim Coan
One of the PBS shows that he did. He's got a new center designed to teach scientists to talk to the public.
Marco Iacoboni
Yeah. And it's badly needed, because a lot of scientists.
Jim Coan
Desperately needed. I mean, it's, you know, we don't know how to do it.
Marco Iacoboni
Yeah.
Jim Coan
And, you know, you and I were just talking about this earlier, when we were buying our bourbons that, you know, we sort of had to learn it, by hook or crook, you know, as we go along. We were watching people in the audience fall asleep. You know?
Marco Iacoboni
I learned how to do that, you know, while I was getting interviewed.
Jim Coan
Yes, that's right.
Marco Iacoboni
And realize that I was really not transmitting, well, this concept. And I get better and better and better. The more you do it, the better you do.
Jim Coan
Yeah. The more you do it, the better you get at it. I mean, if you're paying attention to the feedback.
Marco Iacoboni
If you care about it.
Jim Coan
If you care about it. And I think you should, because I think part of the problem, I mean people have said that, you know, there's lots of you know, social media complaining about the way that scientists sell their work to journalists. Well, come on. The thing is either your work never leaves the ivory tower because you're just too timid or too pure to talk to the media or the media who are not scientists, I mean, sometimes they are and a lot of... there's a lot of excellent journalism out there.
Marco Iacoboni
Good science writers.
Jim Coan
Good science writers. Ed Yong. I love Ed Yong. But a lot of journalists will take what you're telling them and mess it up.
Marco Iacoboni
Yeah.
Jim Coan
And you can't really fault them because they're not they're not scientists.
Marco Iacoboni
But it's also your fault. I mean, there's different kinds of media coverages of science work. Some it's done with such a time pressure that you can't even complain if things get messed up.
Jim Coan
That's right.
Marco Iacoboni
But you know, the more thoughtful pieces, you have time to actually talk to the science rather.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Marco Iacoboni
And I think that if the article doesn't reflect the concept of the science, it's really your fault, because you're not able to communicate it well.
Jim Coan
Well, that's, that's exactly- So that's what I was leading to is that, if scientists aren't trained to communicate in a way that preserves the core of the science itself, and can be accessible to people who don't have a PhD in neuroscience, then if we can't figure out how to do that, then these mistakes are going to keep going on and on and on and on and on.
Marco Iacoboni
You know, what I'm telling you is that when I wrote the book, I realized one thing.
Jim Coan
Okay.
Marco Iacoboni
This is a book for general readers, not for scientists. And I realized...
Jim Coan
You decided that early?
Marco Iacoboni
Yeah, that was early- I mean, after all, my science was well published. ... In writing the book, I realized, if I really understand the phenomenon, I should be able to explain to pretty much everyone. But oftentimes, we, you know, we use our jargon and whats called the purity of science, just to cover up the fact that we don't understand what you're talking about.
Jim Coan
Right? Hey, that's a really good point, I hadn't really thought about that. The jargon. Because, you know, the commonest explanation for jargon is our need for precision.
Marco Iacoboni
Right. But it's not!
Jim Coan
But you're saying something the opposite.
Marco Iacoboni
It's a cold war, that can mean different things for different people.
Jim Coan
How fascinating. What an incredibly interesting point. I hadn't really thought of that before.
Marco Iacoboni
We are after mechanisms, right? So mechanisms can be explained in simple words. If you really understand it.
Jim Coan
Shit. That's a totally different take on it. I like that very much... I'm gonna think about that a lot.
Marco Iacoboni
That also means that talking to the media is important for your own mental processes. For the clarity of your mind and what you're doing. The concept you know, the kind of phenomena you're studying, and how you explain them to yourself. And it's almost a test of whether or not you understand what you're talking about.
Jim Coan
That's a really interesting contrual of this whole process. So you talk a little bit about not only the science, but the sort of personal process of doing that science in the book. Was that sort of more autobiographical element, part of explaining it? Part of drawing people in?
Marco Iacoboni
I think so. I mean, after all, science is made by human beings. I mean, this whole idea that science is the view from nowhere, this objective kind of activity, it's bullshit. We are, we're human beings, and we have our biases. And also, it makes it more relatable. I mean, if I'm not a scientist, realizing that after all, the science process is made by real people with their own, you know, upbringing, different cultures, different ways of thinking, personalities, it makes it more relatable to the reader. So the reader enjoys it more. It's more like, you know, a story in adventure.
Jim Coan
Yeah, you know, one of the things that, and I think this partly comes out of like fiction and stuff, you know, the depiction of the scientist, as this, you know, sort of mildly crazy, socially awkward lab coat, you know. There is some of that. I remember- I'll never forget seeing my chemistry professor in the grocery store in undergraduate school walking around, and he was holding a melon, and he looked like he was inspecting it for ripeness or something, and his safety goggles are still up on his head. You know, so there's an element of that. It's kind of hard to deny. But in actual fact, the diversity of types of people in science is exactly a reflection of any other domain that I've ever seen.
Marco Iacoboni
It's part of the story. I mean, to understand the whole scientific process, you have to understand the people make it.
Jim Coan
That's right.
Marco Iacoboni
Because science is made by human beings.
Jim Coan
That's right. That's absolutely right. And this is one of the reasons that I want to do these recordings, because I think that even reading a newsprint article, you don't get access to the person very well.
Marco Iacoboni
Exactly. But that's why we also travel, right? Why would we visit other labs. Because reading the paper is one thing but go into the lab. I mean, you today you gave wonderful talk, and you mentioned Graziano, and I was- I read these papers, but until I went to his lab, I really didn't understand. So I mean, I knew what he was talking about.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Marco Iacoboni
But seeing the videos. of his monkeys...
Jim Coan
I would love to see that.
Marco Iacoboni
Mind blowing.
Jim Coan
So you made a decision writing this book to include personal stories, personal anecdotes, your feelings about things.
Marco Iacoboni
And also celebrating my students because after all, that's one thing we have to remember. I mean, they do most of the work so almost every chapter-
Jim Coan
After a certain point, that's absolutely true.
Marco Iacoboni
And actually I'm kind of envious because that still the best part of the whole scientific process doing the study.
Jim Coan
Totally. My students I was telling you earlier, my students run circles around me now into tons of data and analysis with MRI data. You know, I just the advances they're they're taking. And I know that someday they're going to experience what I'm experiencing, you know. Their students are going to lap them. It's just sort of how it goes. Right. But this last year, I had an incredible experience. It's like going home, to relive your youth for a minute. You know, for a week, my EEG system just went belly up. And I had to fix it. And I did. And I went and I did myself. I went in there, I worked on stuff and put it all back together, I took it apart, I sent some of it out for it to be repaired. And oh, man.
Jim Coan
It must have been a very good feeling.
Jim Coan
It was such a great feeling. I mean, there was there was stress about it, because I wasn't doing all this other stuff that I do now. I put that on hold for a little while. But I sort of gave myself a couple of months to just work on my stuff in the lab.
Marco Iacoboni
And you know, that's awesome. Yeah, you know, the flow of stuff. And that's why it's so rewarding, because we have an immediate feedback. I mean, you fix your EEG and you see that you fix it right away.
Jim Coan
Right? You can see you did this thing and now it's doing the stuff.
Marco Iacoboni
I mean it's an idea of the paper and sending the paper out four years later, and getting a review back 10 months later. It's such a delayed gratification.
Jim Coan
I know
Marco Iacoboni
You really must love doing the science to actually... because the gratification.
Jim Coan
Do you remember doing your dissertation?
Marco Iacoboni
I do. I do. I loved it actually.
Jim Coan
Did you?
Marco Iacoboni
I mean at that time I was even more you know, I was very idealistic. I was the luckiest guy on Earth. I was doing this beautiful thing. Remember, years before I was treating patients which I loved I love also that, the human relations. But I loved the science a little more. And I thought, This is so great. Because you know when you see patients also grinding kind of activity.
Jim Coan
Yeah, you love immediate feedback and things like that.
Marco Iacoboni
I also really I felt it was great to be able to just sit down and write a dissertation about experiments you've done, you've devised.
Jim Coan
It is great. I should never complain, but I do all the time.
Marco Iacoboni
So I felt really good about it. And yeah, I didn't have any complaining or you know, nightmares about my dissertation.
Jim Coan
Good. So you wrote your book. You sent it in. How'd it go?
Marco Iacoboni
Well, actually, I was almost kind of forced to write the book because I mean, the media was following my research all the time. And at some point, John Brockman sent me an email in which he says the title of the email is, Your next book. And he explains his old agency, of course, I already knew him. I knew he was the biggest agent, scientist.
Jim Coan
A super agent.
Marco Iacoboni
And then, maybe I really have to write this book. Because I knew that writing a book, it's a lot of time, it's a lot of work.
Jim Coan
And it's a really different kind of work. I
Marco Iacoboni
t's a very different kind of work.
Jim Coan
It's not any writing an article.
Marco Iacoboni
And I'm kind of a lazy guy. So but you know, when Brockman sends you an email like that you want to meet the guy. I met, the guy. He was a riot.
Jim Coan
He was in LA?
Marco Iacoboni
He was in LA. I mean, he's based in New York. But, you know, travels a lot. And at some point, he's visiting LA. He's in LA, and we have lunch together. I find the guy very charming and fun. So and then he says, Well, then write this book proposal. And I say, Okay, I'll think about it. I wasn't really still convinced about it. But then it's Christmastime, and you know, things slow down.
Jim Coan
A little extra time.
Marco Iacoboni
A little extra time. I'm always the first one to wake up in the house. In two mornings, just one hour each morning before breakfast, I write my proposal, and I send it in. I go skiing, I'm in Colorado, skiing and Brockman calls me. And he says, We love your proposal. We're gonna actually send it out. But we should send it out at the right time. And they say, Well, you know, Rossana Blakeslee is actually writing a huge spread on the New York Times about mirror neurons. And so I told him, Well, maybe you want to send it out around the time...
Jim Coan
Around that time.
Marco Iacoboni
And he says, Around that time? We sent it out the same morning that the article came out.
Jim Coan
It's like when they send a satellite out into space. They try to round it past Jupiter to take advantage of the slingshot gravitational...
Marco Iacoboni
That's what he does. I mean, the article comes out the same morning, it fires up, you know, my proposal to all the publishers in New York. And I got lucky because two publishers actually started bidding against each other.
Jim Coan
Wow.
Marco Iacoboni
So I got a very nice beefy contract. And I never written a book before. And so after I signed the contract, you know what John Brockman tells me? Now I feel empathy for you. You have to write the book.
Jim Coan
Geez, now you gotta write a book and it's better be good, man. Don't mess that one up.
Marco Iacoboni
And it was a little unsettling. I mean, writing a book he said, very different story that's for lay people then writing an article or a grant application. But then I enjoyed the process through. I enjoyed so much they thought I'm gonna write another book very soon. And it's now ten years later, I haven't written a second book and people keep asking me, Why not?
Jim Coan
Yeah. Well why not? I asking you right now?
Marco Iacoboni
And I have the answer. The answer is I need to fall in love with the story. Because I mean, the story of mirroring people, I really fell in love with it. I really- In spite of all my being hesitant because I knew it was a lot of work, it was a different kind of work. I really, I thought it's an important story to write. And until I have that meaningful kind of relationship with another story, there is no sense.
Jim Coan
You've got plenty of work to do.
Marco Iacoboni
Oh, yeah.
Jim Coan
You got lots of stuff to do.
Marco Iacoboni
Yeah.
Jim Coan
Yeah. No, I think that's a perfect sort of heuristic to use to decide to do something so large.
Marco Iacoboni
Right.
Jim Coan
You know, I think it's great. It makes perfect sense to me. How was the process of writing the book? Clearly, it's different from writing a scientific article?
Marco Iacoboni
Yeah, that was also the other thing that initially concerned me, because books, you know, they are kind of broad kind of objects, in a way. Verbal objects. But then when I wrote the proposal, I realized, Wait a minute, I know everything that I've been putting down in the proposal. I don't have to do research. I don't had to, you know, kind of stretch myself and talk about stuff I don't know. I really know everything. Every chapter, I know what I'm talking about.
Jim Coan
Yeah, that's a beautiful thing. That's flow.
Marco Iacoboni
For me, it was. I mean, it was, you know... It's still... you have to get better. Because it was initially a little tough. But it was still-
Jim Coan
Well and the other question I have, I mean, I know people, plenty of people, like John Height is a friend of mine, and other people have written books I know, that the process of working with an editor can be challenging.
Marco Iacoboni
That's right. I was a little concerned about that, too.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Marco Iacoboni
But then I realized, I get lucky. I get this freelance guy that I hired and he was a sports writer.
Jim Coan
Oh, wow cool.
Marco Iacoboni
And I thought, If he gets it, it's probably perfect, but you never know. I mean, working with others. We have this idea that thing you know, when you write it's your own work.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Marco Iacoboni
And that can be diluted or changed by other people.
Jim Coan
It's my art. It's my soul.
Marco Iacoboni
But actually, that's another thing we have to re- It's a delusion. I mean, the best work comes from collaboration, after all.
Jim Coan
I think that's really true.
Marco Iacoboni
It's your science and my science that actually tells us that.
Jim Coan
Yes, that's right. That's right. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. It's all about collaboration. So why? But then there's artistic integrity, you see.
Marco Iacoboni
Yeah, that's right. BUt my first draft, I just, I wrote it all. But then I realized that, you know, I really needed someone else that would make it. And he made very few changes, but the few changes he made just shuffling things around, inandadding a few things here and there.
Jim Coan
It made sense?
Marco Iacoboni
Perfect, it was just perfect. And I didn't change really anything about the study or the substance of the book. He maybe it just better. The idea that you write by yourself, it's just, again, a romantic delusion of centuries ago, and it's really good. I mean, so what I'm saying is that if you're listening to this podcast, and you're thinking of writing a book, you've never written a book, don't be afraid of being edited. It's actually a good experience.
Jim Coan
Well, okay, so you write the book. That's out. You are the mirror neuron guy.
Marco Iacoboni
Mr. Mirror Neuron.
Jim Coan
Mr. Mirror Neuron for humans, certainly. I mean, whenever anybody thinks that phrase mirror neurons, we think we think Marco Iacoboni.
Marco Iacoboni
Especially in the lay peaople. Because my science was covered a lot being by the media, and because my book is probably the most successful, accessible book on mirror neurons.
Jim Coan
Right. I think that's right.
Marco Iacoboni
A lot of people outside the neurosciences when they think about mirror neurons, they think more about me than Bill Rizzolatti, which is can I feel bad about it.
Jim Coan
Yeah. Well, it depends on whether you're... I mean, it's sort of like, you know, people that know late versus early Rolling Stones. It's like you're later Rolling Stones. He's earlier Rolling Stones. But one of the things I wanted to ask you to help me understand is the backlash. The mirror neurons. I mean, there was a popular book, just a couple of years ago out.
Marco Iacoboni
Yeah. The Myth of Mirror Neurons.
Jim Coan
The Myth of Mirror Neurons, right? Everybody's passing it around social media, because it's sort of like, you know, it's sort of like the fashion now to disprove a thing.
Marco Iacoboni
Yeah. But actually, there is nothing that book actually disproved. First of all, it comes from a very simple paper that the same author wrote for Journal of Neuroscience, and the book is just an expansion of that.
Jim Coan
Who's the author of that again?
Marco Iacoboni
Hickok.
Jim Coan
Oh, yeah. Hickok. Right. Yeah.
Marco Iacoboni
But the idea is that I mean, there's no meat. I mean, different mirror neuorns are- it's a real phenomenon. It's among the most demonstrable.
Jim Coan
I guess, the way that I've heard the controversy is, is it that there are specific neurons that are for the purpose of mirroring? Or is it that it's a thing that neurons in the brain do?
Marco Iacoboni
Is that really a question that makes any sense at all? We know that the brain-
Jim Coan
I mean, in the sense that there might be other neurons that never mirror?
Marco Iacoboni
Oh, yeah, I mean, that's possible. We don't know about that. But certainly my idea is that mirror neurons become mirror. And they acquire the property of being mirroring, in the sense of responding to the same action that they could motorically.
Marco Iacoboni
I see.
Marco Iacoboni
But it's probably...
Jim Coan
But is mirroring just like a thing that brains do? Or it's a thing that brains have as in like a Lego piece that is the mirror part.
Marco Iacoboni
No, I think it's more like a process. When I think about a brain, so it's like that. The brain I mean, we know this amazing plasticity in the brain, we know. And when I went to med school, that was many years ago, I was told that you reach a certain age, and you can only lose neurons. We know that's not true anymore.
Jim Coan
Right.
Marco Iacoboni
That brain you can induce neurogenesis with stimulation with others things.
Jim Coan
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marco Iacoboni
So I mean, neurons are plastic properties, they change their own responses. And so actually, that's the way I think about mirror neurons. So say in ontogeny, I'm the baby, you are the caregiver. The baby smiles, the caregiver can tell smiles back at the baby. And the baby's brain is very simple to make through associative learning, a connection between making a smile and seeing someone else smile.
Jim Coan
Oh I see.
Marco Iacoboni
So mirror neurons are born, right there.
Jim Coan
Right, but it's still, I guess in that sense, the designation of one set of neurons versus another. One set of neurons is mirror neurons and the other is not mirror neurons might be because the mirror neurons are the ones that have been... that have had that associative learning.
Marco Iacoboni
Right.
Jim Coan
They're not necessarily phylogenetically, you know.
Marco Iacoboni
No.
Jim Coan
They're in the right place at the right time for having that mirroring interaction.
Marco Iacoboni
Right. But that's very simple. I mean, after all, mirror neurons are defined by the physiological properties they have. Think about the simple and complex cells of Hubel and Wiesel. They're just pyramidal neurons and they have these these properties.
Jim Coan
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, I guess yeah, that makes sense. That makes a lot of sense to me. So in that sense, how would it be possible for you know, mirror neurons to be mythical unless you're stuck thinking about them in that way that I've just been describing? Like, there is a kind of neuron that only is a mirror neuron.
Marco Iacoboni
I think Hickok and others that were critical of mirror neurons were mostly critical of some of the interpretations about mirror neurons rather than... The phenomenon is there. I mean, there's no doubt. It's actually very compelling. And it's very pervasive. And actually, I think it's very important because it really it's a way to show how the brain simulates the self and the other.
Jim Coan
Yeah, right. I always have a minor religious experience with every human. Well, that's great, that's really illuminating. That helps me a lot understand sort of the the issue because when I watch people in social media discussing mirror neurons, and sort of having that, you know, fashionable sneer around, you know, the use of mirror neurons or discussing neurons, I think that what they're doing is they're reacting to a sort of cartoon caricature of what it is.
Marco Iacoboni
Exactly. Most people don't even know what the controversy is about. But because they know there is a controversy, which is actually totally artificial, they think, Wow, this stuff is unclear.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Marco Iacoboni
But the stuff is completely reproducible in every lab.
Jim Coan
Okay. Moving on from the mirror neurons era, I mean, you're still obviously interested in mirroring as a process.
Marco Iacoboni
And what we're doing now it's the logical follow up. That is with mirror neurons, you need to have a control system, because otherwise you'll be imitating other peopl all the time.
Jim Coan
Right, so what's maybe differentiating you from the other?
Marco Iacoboni
Right. And so what we're studying is the control mirroring. But what we're doing is that is to figure out how, you know, people often conceptualize mirroring and control as completely separate kind of processes. And what we're finding out is that indeed, they are actually able to intertwine, they're always interacting. And so, to give you an example, in the whole empathy, and mind reading, and social cognition kind of world, people cannot differentiate between mirroring or emotional contagions of the behavior which is very fast to sort of behavior. Al la Kahneman. With you know, mentalizing and mind reading, which is a slow, more flexible, more deliberate kind of behavior. And again, people talk about these things also, almost as they are completely independent. And we're finding they're not. That is even when you're doing... Even when I see you falling from a bike and I have this immediate reaction, which is like emotional contagion kind of reaction, some of my mentalizing a mind reading processes are going on. And even when I'm doing tasks that on the face of it have nothing to do with mirroring, like sending money to Africa, because I realized that they need money. Or you have some extra cash.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Marco Iacoboni
Which seems very deliberate and very-
Jim Coan
Very well it's top down. Right?
Marco Iacoboni
Exactly. Then even that kind of task probably relies a lot on my previous sensorimotor experiences that I had with other people and which are using a lot of mirror neurons?
Jim Coan
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So some people I've heard talk about theory of mind, you know, the understanding another mind in a very sort of higher level cognitive model, starting with a sort of a seed of being able to do what other people do.
Marco Iacoboni
Right.
Jim Coan
And that that informs the sort of the cognitive schema, if you will, of how other people might think or might be feeling.
Marco Iacoboni
But for a long time, people have actually constructed this idea. There are two systems the system for ...
Jim Coan
System two. Khaneman stuff. Yeah.
Marco Iacoboni
But well I don't think that that's the case. I mean, I will translate system one and system two into bottom up and top down.
Jim Coan
So what do you mean by bottom up and top down?
Marco Iacoboni
Bottom up is like a seal. I look at your face and my perception immediately start triggering a lot of simulations inside my brain.
Jim Coan
You just start sort of reacting.
Marco Iacoboni
Right. And so that's the bottom up kind of thing.
Jim Coan
Okay.
Marco Iacoboni
But then you need to top down in the sense, you need to control all this stream of information. Because otherwise, if that simple information is not controlled, it's going to actually control your own behavior. You still want to be in charge of your own behavior.
Jim Coan
Right. Right. Right. It's the big human innovation. This is cortex.
Marco Iacoboni
Exactly.
Jim Coan
That's the that's the cartoon anyways.
Marco Iacoboni
Cognitive control.
Jim Coan
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marco Iacoboni
So these two things rather than, and often people, when they talk about these things they- I have to feeling they talk about these things in a very static way. And these are actually continuously interacting processes. And again, even when you're doing a task that on the face of it seems to actually activate only type one, or only type two, most likely you're seeing this. You're having top-down bottom-up interactions all the time.
Jim Coan
So when we're interacting with someone, what you're sort of what you're saying is that mirroring is happening all the time and control of mirroring is happening all the time. So that we don't just start doing what everybody else is doing. You know, I've often wondered about that. Because, you know, if you think about the immune system, for example, the big task of the immune system is to know what particles in my bloodstream are me and what ones are not me.
Marco Iacoboni
Right.
Jim Coan
Right. And so I always think about that when I think about like mirroring and stuff like that, because it seems like that is just sort of recapitulated higher up on the central nervous system. And so you and I are and so many people are so interested and enchanted by the idea of encoding the other asme. But of course, we can't do that all the time or we'd be crazy.
Marco Iacoboni
Right, right. In the end- But the interesting thing is that if this top-down, bottom-up interactions are happening all the time, we often construe control as a deliberate kind of process. I'm controlling myself.
Jim Coan
Right.
Marco Iacoboni
And, you know, I'm planning to do certain things. That's the classical control mechanism. Right? But what we're saying is that actually a lot of the control that is going on, it's implicit. It's not something that we have a deliberate plan to make it, but it's still happening.
Jim Coan
Well, that messes with the bottom-up top-down distinction a little bit, doesn't it?
Marco Iacoboni
No, it just makes, I mean, it gives you a different perspective on what control is.
Jim Coan
It's built in, it's baked into the system.
Marco Iacoboni
Yeah, it's almost a... It's a habit. I mean, think about, you know, a sporting activity. My favorite activity's, of course, tennis everybody knows.
Jim Coan
You play every day right? God damnit. You walk to work in Southern California, you play tennis every day.
Marco Iacoboni
It's the bliss of life.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Marco Iacoboni
But the point is that when you if you want to really improve your tennis game, you really have to practice a lot, right? And that means you're going to be able to control your shots. You do that in a very implicit way. You don't do it and say, Oh, I'm gonna hit the forehand this way, rather than that way. Just practice it in a certain way. And through repetition, you improve your control.
Jim Coan
And do you see shifts in what controls that top-down process from one part of the brain to the other as it becomes more of a habit?
Marco Iacoboni
We haven't seen it. I'm pretty sure those shift happened but we're not- I mean, those studies, as you know, are complex to do.
Jim Coan
They're very complex, but I'm sort of obsessed with them. I want to see that it moves from like, lateral PFC, you know, to medial and motor cortex and basal ganglia.
Marco Iacoboni
Yeah, that requires a lot of the, you know, it's a complex kind of study, but that's something that eventually wewill be doing.
Jim Coan
Yeah, I wonder about that with things like meditation and stuff too.
Marco Iacoboni
Yeah meditation certainly changes that. I'm pretty sure the meditation... But one thing we're doing now with this study of control is to try to modulate it. I mean, we have a nice tool called TMS. And figuring out which regions are doing control or mirroring, we can suppress the activity in those regions, and we can see where it-
Jim Coan
We can knock it out.
Marco Iacoboni
Knock them out and see where the people become more empathic and more generous. And we have two nice results that show exactly that. That people are... we reduced group prejudice, you know.
Jim Coan
You sorted out grouped prejudice manipulation.
Marco Iacoboni
Yeah, exactly. So people are reading two essays of immigrants in the United States and one is in favor of the States and the other one is against the United States and they get ranked. But when we suppressed medial prefrontal cortex-
Jim Coan
Why medial prefrontal cortex?
Marco Iacoboni
Well, immediate prefrontal cortex is a dangerous area for a number of reasons. We know it's important for brain control. We have some evidence from our brain imaging studies that indeed that region seems to be really important for controlling mirroring.
Jim Coan
I see.
Marco Iacoboni
So that's why we...
Jim Coan
So mirroring would make people more empathic.
Marco Iacoboni
Exactlly.
Jim Coan
Even if you're not observing someone?
Marco Iacoboni
Even if you're not observing someone.
Jim Coan
Okay, right. So even then, you sort of play a simulation.
Marco Iacoboni
The way I'm thinking about it is that when you think about people, even when you think about people in a very abstract kind of way, in a very cursory kind of way, you can't tell people you're going to rely on the sensory model representation that you had with your real life interactions.
Jim Coan
So you're using transcranial magnetic stimulation to disrupt right the activity in this medial prefrontal area where there's a lot of mirroring going on while people.
Marco Iacoboni
Control of mirroring.
Jim Coan
Control of mirroring. I'm sorry, control of mirroring is happening. And you're having people either read a sort of pro immigrant or an anti immigrant kind of...
Marco Iacoboni
We showed that we kind of erased completely group prejudice.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Marco Iacoboni
And the other thing we do is that-
Jim Coan
You erase it by removing control?
Marco Iacoboni
By removing control. So increasing the mirroring. So one thing we know about empathy in humans is that empathy is strong within a social group, but it drops dramatically outside that social group.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Marco Iacoboni
So if I look at you, as someone outside my social group, I have very little empathy for you. And that's because of the control. We think.
Jim Coan
So you know, as we talked about this too, the ages old debate about whether we're sort of intrinsically good orintrinsically bad. One way you could phrase it, do we intrinsically empathize? Or do we intrinsically cast out people who are unfamiliar? This seems to suggest that we have to learn to control our intrinsic, empathizing with people.
Marco Iacoboni
My research-
Jim Coan
You have to learn outgroups.
Marco Iacoboni
Exactly, I mean, many reasons they made me think that our default mode is to be empathic, and they we learn how to become unempathic, at least for certain kinds of people.
Jim Coan
Boy. Wow why do you think? I mean, it sort of makes sense that people can be dangerous, right? So you have to learn to discern who to judge. But it's so fascinating that the machinery that we have in place is sort of... The default machinery is understand and empathize and connect.
Marco Iacoboni
Yeah. As you said, it's all a philosophical debate, right? Are you born as a good person? Who then learns how to become a little selfish? Or are you born as a selfish individual that then learns how to be prosocial because we live in a societ.
Jim Coan
Right.
Marco Iacoboni
Now I tend more for the former than the latter. I think that that's the data we have suggested. That's the case that we learn to become a little less empathic.
Jim Coan
Yeah, I think that's probably true. And yet, we could also say that we definitely robustly have both capabilities. And so the potential to control that sort of default setting is in itself partly default. Right? It's partly what we we're packaged with.
Marco Iacoboni
Yeah. Sort of but you know, again, if you think from an ontogenetic standpoint, when you're really young, young, young, you have less controls.
Jim Coan
Oh, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. And kids play readily with people they don't understand. I mean, I see it in my own kids all the time. They go to the party,there's other kids there. There's a little moment of shyness, and then they're, off and dressing up like princesses or whatever.
Marco Iacoboni
Exactly.
Jim Coan
Yeah, that's good stuff.
Marco Iacoboni
And they imitate each other a lot. Imitation through bodily imitation, that's the way you connect with other minds.
Jim Coan
So one of the things that I saw in your materials for this conference was a mention of sort of existential neuroscience.
Marco Iacoboni
Right.
Jim Coan
Can you explain that a little bit to me?
Marco Iacoboni
Yeah. I mean, it's almost also, the last chapter of the book talks about it essentially. The whole idea is that when you look in your science, there is a lot of really clever people and beautiful work that is very, very abstract. In these abstract work, it's important too, but you have the feeling that it tends us to believe in a sort of a platonic brain.
Jim Coan
The essential brain. Right?
Marco Iacoboni
And when you think about the essence of the brain, then I can't help it but think about Sartre saying that existence precedes essence. And in fact-
Jim Coan
Sartre just before throwing up. So nauseous from the lack of meaning.
Marco Iacoboni
But I mean, you've seen brains, right?
Jim Coan
Yeah. Oh, yeah.
Marco Iacoboni
There are similarities but there is plenty of differences.
Jim Coan
Yes, absolutely. I even saw my own a few times.
Marco Iacoboni
Exactly.
Jim Coan
It's nice to know.
Marco Iacoboni
Me too.
Jim Coan
It's good to have reassurance you know?
Marco Iacoboni
And sure it's important to look into individual variation, trying to figure out how to actually study brains that are... In which you take into account the individual features of the brain.
Jim Coan
Yes.
Marco Iacoboni
Especially when it comes to neuromodulation. Especially when it comes to using TMS, which is a technique in which you stimulate the region, but the effects of the stimulation spread through white matter tracks. So you really need to know exactly what's the why-
Jim Coan
I didn't really realized that. But it makes sense, of course, it would spread through white matter tracks.
Marco Iacoboni
I mean, it doesn't stay there. I mean, clearly, we've plenty of evidence that it goes at, you know, at circuit level in terms of effects. And so you really need to know, what's the underlying anatomy. No one is doing that. So that's one aspect of it.
Jim Coan
There's just sort of, you know, about really taking an idiographic view of the brain, that everybody's brains is sufficiently different, that it's harder to make big generalizations than we think.
Marco Iacoboni
Right.
Jim Coan
Oh that sucks.
Marco Iacoboni
And the other part of the existentialist neuroscience studies that, you know, my work made me think I mean... We have this tendency to think about the brain as a computer as a very abstract kind of machine.
Jim Coan
Yeah.
Marco Iacoboni
But the brain deals with the stuff that is real real life, that is bodies and...
Jim Coan
Perception action, what we can do with the world.
Marco Iacoboni
Exactly.
Jim Coan
Moving my body through space.
Marco Iacoboni
And that's really pretty much as existentialists because it's really...
Jim Coan
That's right, that is existential.
Marco Iacoboni
So these are the two reasons why I like to. And also I like the existentialists. They're fun people.
Jim Coan
Existentialists are great. We were talking about the difference between Sartre and Camus and I think we're both Camus fans.
Marco Iacoboni
Yeah.
Jim Coan
Because Camus liked to dance while smoking. Yeah.
Marco Iacoboni
I like that.
Jim Coan
That's a great metaphor for life. I think we should all do that. Because we're all going to die.
Marco Iacoboni
Eventually.
Jim Coan
Eventually.
Marco Iacoboni
Alone.
Jim Coan
No, but that's the thing. I'm not sure that they were right. Let me think, Sartre said a lot about, you know, he emphasized the dying alone. They were all sort of dramatically proclaiming the lack of meaning in the world. But I don't quite buy it.
Marco Iacoboni
No, I don't buy that too. I mean, I think actually, life and what you do, you create the meaning.
Jim Coan
You create the meaning you manufacture the meaning.
Marco Iacoboni
And it's very important for motivation. I mean, doing stuff that is not meaningful to you, kills you. It just kills you. whereas whenever you do stuff that is meaningful to you, and to others, hopefully, then it's really something that you want to do. You don't have to have that extra motivation to do it.
Jim Coan
You're not seeking your reward. Your reward is right now.
Marco Iacoboni
It's right there.
Jim Coan
Right now. Well, dude, that sounds like a perfect description of the way that you're living your life, and you're doing your science and you're doing your work.
Marco Iacoboni
That is I'm pretty much mirroring my life in my own work.
Jim Coan
Yeah, yeah. You're mirroring your life in your own work. Yeah, you're really seizing the day, like the existentialists would have it. So you're perhaps the world's quintessential existential neuroscientist.
Marco Iacoboni
I love that.
Jim Coan
All right. Well, thanks, man.
Marco Iacoboni
Thank you.
Jim Coan
Okay, that's it. That's a rap. That made me laugh. I don't know why. That's kind of funny. That was like a cliche. I've never said that's a rap before. All right. Thanks to Marco Iacoboni for chatting with me. And clearing a few things up there. It's good to hear his views on mirroring and empathy, and the brain's construction of the self and sort of how the brain differentiates the self from the other and, you know, on and on. I could go on and on with that stuff. And also really interesting to hear about his experience becoming a science superstar. Which is something you know... You know, the thing is as enjoyable as Marco is in that recorded conversation, I still wish you could all just spend some actual time with him. Marco Iacoboni is just, he's just a really fun guy to spend time with. Truth is I couldn't let the recorder go on and on that day, and maybe that's what I'll do next time I see hi.m I'll just sort of follow him around with a handheld recorder catching everything. That'd be fun. Anyway, thanks again, Marco. For a fantastic conversation. I owe you, pall. Folks, the music on Circle of Willis is written by Tom Stouffer and Jean Ruli and performed by their band the New Drake's. For information on how to purchase their music, check the about page at Circle of Willis podcast.com. Don't forget also, that Circle of Willis is brought to you by VQR and the Center for Media and Citizenship at the University of Virginia. And that Circle of Willis is a member of the TEEJFM network. You can find more about that at teej.fm. Now, if you liked this podcast, how about giving us a little review at iTunes, letting us know how we're doing? It is actually easy. I say that every time but I mean it. I swear to God, it is easy and we like it. Or you can send us an email by going to Circle of Willis podcast.com and clicking on the Contact tab. Just give us a little message there. In any case, I will see you all in episode eight, where I'll be talking with psychologist and fellow podcaster Simine Vazire of the University of California at Davis, about the stability of personality and the various recommendations of the replication movement in science generally, and psychology more specifically. Until then, bye bye.