Hello. My name is <insert pseudonym-of-choice> and I suffer from Privaticus Neuroticus. PN is a bizarre and conflicted attachment to my sense of privacy, especially on the Internet.

Ok, I don’t really have PN. “Privaticus Neuroticus” sounds more like an endangered species of plant than a mental disorder, anyway, and it doesn’t exist.

But I do have unresolved conflicts about my personal privacy.

That isn’t unusual - most folks I know are worried about their credit card numbers, banking info, and browsing history being tracked online. I’ve come to grips with those risks, but I’m more troubled by another even more disturbing phenomena..

Search-engine enabled family and friends!

(Oh, the horror!)

When I first discovered the Internet, the anonymity was reassuring. No one knew who I was, and no one really wanted to know who I was. I was a faceless system font, lost in a sea of fonts. Nothing was indexed, nothing was searchable. The expense and geek factors kept the Average Joe (and my family) out of the game.

I found could explore and even discuss any topic I wanted to, without fear that my mother or next door neighbor would find out. I didn’t need to worry about them overhearing me and butting in with nosey advice and judgements. It was freedom of a sort I’d never experienced. I could be transparently honest in a big way, and my openness was appreciated - hearing my thoughts seemed to benefit others in their own search for sanity, truth, understanding, and the perfect shade of blue.

It was a Good Thing.

Then everything changed. The price of computers dropped. Software became easier to navigate. Online services became affordable.

My family joined the computer age.
They got AOL access.

Three generations of AOL access.

Then… they discovered Google.

My family ran every email address they’d ever known through Google. They ran the domain names through Google. They ran my friend’s names through Google. They ran my DOG’S name through Google, for gawd’s sake.

No, I’m not kidding.

It was the damnedest thing.

My family has never been the poke-around-in-someone’s-medicine-cabinet variety. They’re all quite private, too. But somehow, their own sense of privacy on the Internet made them feel that it was ok to violate mine, and so they stalked me through message boards, webpage articles, and USENET.

Randomly, they’d look at me over the rims of their glasses and a freshly baked slice of apple pie, and ask about something I’d said 8 years previously on alt.misanthrope. Each time, I’d let out this odd little scream. Each time, they’d ask if I wanted vanilla ice cream with my pie.

Mind you, it isn’t that I’ve ever written anything that I’m exactly ashamed of writing. It’s just.. well… when I write, or speak, it’s with a specific audience in mind. It’s in context, sometimes a closed context.

I like it that way.

I don’t want my brother-in-law sneering at my meandering thoughts on God,and I don’t want my great uncle leering at my nude paintings. It’s ok for strangers to sneer and leer, but not family. I do have my standards. Granted, they are double standards, but they are standards, dammit.

I suppose that if I were truly well adjusted, I wouldn’t mind them all of this sneering and peering. I would know my family loves me, no matter what they think of my posts on alt.orange.octopus. I could affectionately laugh off those friends who insert themselves into my business, and ignore neighborly intrusive meddling.

But I’m not that well adjusted.

I am working on it… I’m aware that my privacy fetish has roots in social anxiety, fears of criticism, and a peculiar sensitivity towards violations of personal boundaries. I know that my insistence on anonymity seriously hampers my attempts at branding and promotion. I know that using initials rather than a name makes me less personable and sincere seeming.

I am struggling to overcome these issues.

I hope to eventually put my real name to this blog. I may even post a picture. I might, someday, give the address to my family… erm. Wait. Nope. Scratch that. No way.

Instead, I’ll start a new organization: Privaticus Neuroticus Anonymous. Yes, that’s just the thing, a support group. 12 steps, maybe..

It will, of course, require another pseudonym…

After all those fast firing mirror neurons, I thought my brain (and yours) needed a break. Wander back to childhood enchantment for a few with Bembo’s Zoo — a seriously cool online animal abc book. A Flash animation shows how the images of each animal are created by arranging letters in the animal’s name.

(Because vegging out is important, too)

Found Via Gretchen Rubin’s blog, The Happiness Project

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So differences in how our mirror neurons react could account for differences in how well we understand social relationships. Got it.

But what if a particularly sensitive mirror-neuron system could also explain why others actually *feel* better understood by some people (ok, me) even when I admittedly don’t understand them well at all? Because that does happen. It happens a lot.
There’s an old communication trick, of mirroring the body language, general tone, and attitude of a person you’re talking with. My recall of the method is vague, but the conscious mirroring was suggested as a way to make the other person feel more understood, as if you’re in synch with them. It was also supposed to help you better understand their own state of mind and what they might be feeling, improving relations over all.

If my mirror neurons are all fired up during an exchange with a person, I am likely mirroring the other person’s body language, word patterns, etc, in a subtle but detectable way. Just like in the communication trick mentioned above, my mirroring them would in fact make them *feel* more understood.

In fact the whole trick might work *because* of mirror neurons - consciously mirroring someone might make them subconsciously assume that neural mirroring was going on. I also have to wonder if conscious mirroring triggers and enhances the mirror neuron system - which would explain the “better understanding” part of the trick.
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Could a person develop a particularly sensitive system of mirror neurons? How?

And (since this is all about my self obsession) why would *my* mirroring system be more reactive, in particular?

Remembering that this is a lot of speculation based on a quick googling of cutting edge neuro science, here’s a few uneddycated guesses:

• It might be a genetic twist of fate, either inherited or by chance. I didn’t run across any studies that had a thing to do with this, and I don’t see a lot of evidence of it in my family tree…but it’s a possibility.
• Environmental impact on brain development. I’m a twin. Twins often mirror each other incessantly, even as infants; it’s part of our learning process. Because this intense mirroring/learning happens in the brains earliest development, it might have a very marked impact on the development of mirror neuron systems. It’s also interesting to ponder the fraternal/identical differences - identical twins might mirror each other better, but be less likely to extend the mirroring outside the “self” of the twinset. (I’m fraternal)
• Familiarity and Experience Throughout my life, I’ve focused on feelings, making an informal experiential study of emotions, intent, and motivation, both my own, and others. The resulting familiarity might have increased my mirror neuron responses to these sorts of things, just like a dancer’s familiarity with a dance move increases their mirror neuron response to that move.
• Intentional blurring of ego boundaries. I’ve practiced many different methods of trance and meditation, much of it pseudo-Buddhist, focused on compassion and dissolving boundaries of ego between self and others. Mirror neurons are sometimes called “Dalai Lama” Neurons, for the very reason that they don’t seem to recognize the boundary between self and other. Could mirror neurons be activated more strongly by this sort of practice? It makes some sense, to me.

So… there are differences between people’s mirroring systems, and there are some reasons that mine in particular might be more sensitive/reactive. That reactivity might make it easier for me to “get into the heads” of other people and understand them, better than some other people without that sensitivity.

(Still with me? Do i sound too egotistical?)

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Ok, so mirror neurons really do seem to be an element in how well we relate to other people’s feelings, motivations, and so on.

But are some people more tuned in than others? *Are* there differences between individual’s mirror neuron systems? And why might mine, in particular, be different? (IF they are! )

Apparently, mirror neuron systems and their reactions do vary, from person to person.

• In autistic subjects , mirror neurons react to the subject’s own movements - but do not mirror the movements of others. The more severe the autism, the less mirroring the mirror neurons do. Since autism is marked by very poor understanding of social relationships, this seems to confirm the link between mirror neurons and understanding social relationships.
• Gender differences have shown up in the mirror neuron systems of men and women. It’s not clear if this is biological, vs cultural, but it makes evolutionary sense: females need to be more empathic when dealing with infants, males less empathic in order to hunt and without over identifying with their prey. (The link above is to the actual research paper. I don’t pretend to understand it - please explain it to me, if you do)
• Familiarity and experience affects the reactions of mirror neurons. Mirrored responses to movement are stronger when we’ve experienced the movement ourselves. So when images of a dance are shown, a trained dancer’s brain will react differently to watching dance moves than a non-dancer’s brain.

So yes, different people’s mirror neurons behave differently, both according to their own brain make up, and their experiences. And yes, mirror neurons are probably involved in understanding social relationships, learning, and predicting the intent/mindset of others.

It’s a good guess then, that an especially sensitive mirror neuron system would lend itself to easier and more accurate perceptions about other people’s intent, motivation, and emotions.

Since I don’t have access to fMRI equipment and the people-of-greater-brain I’d need to interpret the results, I can’t tell you if my own mirror system (or yours, for that matter) is particularly sensitive.

But I can make a guess that those of use who do seem particularly tuned into others emotions and intentions probably have a pretty active set of mirror neurons. I can also guess that the oblivious oaf who cranks his car stereo up at 4am has a mental mirror that needs a serious cleaning with Windex.

But what might create the increased mirror neuron activity some of us might have? What might make it more sensitive?

Stay tuned for more of the hypothesis and the post that ate my weekend.

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In a fearless quest to find answers, I dove into the wilderness of Google for what I thought was light research. In the end, it wasn’t light at all. I found myself wading through research papers that were complicated and fascinating… and in the process lost a few things I should have linked to. Oops.

It turns out that I wasn’t the first to think mirror neurons might be linked to empathy and such — Many not-so-layman-types (ie: neuroscientists) have done research on the topic of mirror neurons and empathy. Their studies show that mirror neurons don’t just react to perceived motion; they react to perceived sensation, too.

If a person sees someone being poked with a needle, the mirror neurons associated with pain light up, just as if he had been poked.

If a person is shown an image of someone else reacting to a noxious smell, neurons light up in the same part of the olfactory area of the brain as if they’d been exposed to the scent. Mirror neurons react to images of touch (a feather duster on skin) sounds ( like laughter) and as already mentioned, to witnessed actions, like grasping an object.

Even more interesting, the reaction of mirror neurons increases when there is a discernible intent behind the observed actions… while the brain will react to an image of a hand holding a coffee cup, it reacts *more* if the image is clearly of a hand grasping a coffee in order to drink it.

Likewise, when the subject is familiar with the action being demonstrated, the reactions are stronger - a dancer’s mirror neurons are more excited by witnessing dance moves he or she is familiar with, than with those they don’t know how to perform.

But these responses aren’t triggered when subjects witness robots grasps an object: the mirror neurons are apparently only attuned to input that reflects our own biological image.
The type of mirroring that goes on in these neurons is different than the intellectual exercise of imagining yourself in someone else’s shoes. It isn’t conscious: the mirror neurons of your brain automatically and involuntarily reacts as if you were the other person, so that your brain experiences a recreation of what you witness other people feeling.

How cool is that? Empathy with a neurological basis.

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