The Age of Empathy (20 page)

Human babies fail to recognize themselves in the mirror until about eighteen to twenty-four months of age.

Around the same time children pass the rouge test, they become sensitive to how others look at them,
show embarrassment, use personal pronouns (“That’s mine!” or “Look at me!”), and develop pretend play in which they act out little scenarios with toys and dolls. These developments are linked. Children passing the rouge test use more “I” and “me” and show more pretend play than children failing this test.

I must admit that I find reactions to mirrors per se a fairly boring topic. They don’t relate to survival and barely play a role in nature. Plenty of animals that fail to recognize their own reflection are doing perfectly fine. What makes mirror tests exciting is what they tell us about how an individual positions itself in the world. A strong sense of self allows it to treat another’s situation as separate from itself, such as when a child first drinks from a glass of water and then offers the same glass to her doll. The child knows very well that dolls don’t drink, but nevertheless likes to attribute emotional states to it. The doll is at the same time similar (“like me”) and different. The child is turning into a role-player, and finds a thirsty, sad, or sleepy doll the perfect partner since it never objects to her fantasies.

Since all of these abilities emerge at the same time as mirror self-recognition, I’ll speak of the
co-emergence hypothesis.
Advanced empathy belongs to the same package. This has been extensively tested on Swiss children by Doris Bischof-Köhler. She’d have a child eat quark (a dairy cream) sitting next to an adult instructed to look sad at a given moment because her spoon broke. The child might pick up an extra spoon left on the table or offer its own spoon. Some children would try to feed their partner with the broken spoon. Or the adult would “accidentally” rip off a limb from her teddy bear, whereupon she was instructed to sob for minutes. Children who repaired the teddy, offered another toy, or stayed close and made eye contact were considered prosocial. When the same children were tested with mirrors, the outcome was entirely in line with the co-emergence hypothesis. Children who had acted prosocially passed the mirror test, whereas those who had given no assistance failed the test.

Why should caring for others begin with the self? There is an abundance of rather vague ideas about this issue, which I am sure
neuroscience will one day resolve. Let me offer my own “hand waving” explanation by saying that advanced empathy requires both mental mirroring and mental separation. The mirroring allows the sight of another person in a particular emotional state to induce a similar state in us. We literally feel their pain, loss, delight, disgust, etc., through so-called shared representations. Neuroimaging shows that our brains are similarly activated as those of people we identify with. This is an ancient mechanism: It is automatic, starts early in life, and probably characterizes all mammals. But we go beyond this, and this is where mental separation comes in. We parse our own state from the other’s. Otherwise, we would be like the toddler who cries when she hears another cry but fails to distinguish her own distress from the other’s. How could she care for the other if she can’t even tell where her feelings are coming from? In the words of psychologist Daniel Goleman, “Self-absorption kills empathy.” The child needs to disentangle herself from the other so as to pinpoint the actual source of her feelings.

Note that I am not talking here about self-reflection or introspection, mainly because we have no way of knowing if preverbal children or animals possess this kind of self-awareness. Even for our own species, I am not as convinced as some scientists are that the questions humans answer about themselves reveal what they truly experience. More interesting than self-reflection is the self-other boundary. Do we see ourselves as a separate entity? Without a concept of self, we’d lack mooring. We’d be like little boats floating and sinking together. One wave of emotion, and we’d move up or down with it. In order to show genuine interest in someone else, offering help when required, one needs to be able to keep one’s own boat steady. The sense of self serves as anchor.

Long ago, before all of the above was known, Gallup proposed that the way a given species processes mirror information tells us something about this sense of self. Certain cognitive capacities can be expected only in species that recognize themselves, he said. Since this idea resembled what happens during child development, it reminds
me of a classic book by Stephen Jay Gould,
Ontogeny and Phylogeny,
which discusses comparisons between individual development (ontogeny) and the evolution of species (phylogeny). Both processes concern vastly different time scales yet show striking parallels. Similarly, the co-emergence hypothesis postulates parallels between ontogeny and phylogeny in that the same capacities that develop together in a two-year-old child evolved together in some animal species.

If so, species that recognize themselves in a mirror should be marked by advanced empathy, such as perspective-taking and targeted helping. Species that don’t recognize themselves, on the other hand, should lack these capacities. This is a testable idea, and Gallup felt that the prime candidates to look at, apart from the apes, would be dolphins and elephants.

Dolphins were the first to fit his prediction.

No one ever blinks an eye if a pop star is called “empty-headed,” or an unpopular American president a “chimp”—even though the primatologist winces at the latter comparison. But when, in 2006, the newspaper headlines screamed that dolphins were “dimwits” and “flippin’ idiots,” I was shocked. Is this a way to talk about an animal so revered that there are Web domains with “smart dolphin” in their name?

This is not to say that one should believe everything they observe about them. For example, their “smile” is fake (they lack the facial muscles for expressions), and all that science seems to have learned from chatting “dolphinese” with them is that lone male dolphins are keenly interested in female researchers.

Nevertheless, it’s going too far to say that dolphins are dumb. Yet this was the claim of Paul Manger, a South African neuroanatomist who said that dolphins’ relatively large brains are due to the preponderance of fatty glial cells. Glial cells produce heat, which allows the brain’s neurons to do their job in the cold ocean. Manger couldn’t
resist adding that the intelligence of dolphins and other cetaceans (such as whales and porpoises) is vastly overrated. He offered gems of insight, such as that dolphins are too stupid to jump over a slight barrier (as when they are trapped in a tuna net), whereas other animals will. Even a goldfish will jump out of its bowl, he noted.

If we skip the technicalities—such as that glial cells add connectivity to the brain, and that humans too have many more of these cells than actual neurons—the goldfish remark reminds me of a common strategy to downplay animal intelligence, which is to “demonstrate” remarkable cognitive feats in small-brained species: If a rat or pigeon can do it, or even do it better, it can’t be that special. Thus, in order to undermine claims of apes having language skills, pigeons have been trained to have “conversations” by hitting a key that offers information to another pigeon, whereupon the other hits a key marked “Thank you!” These birds have also been conditioned to preen themselves before a mirror, supporting the claim that they are “self-aware.”

Clearly, pigeons are trainable. But is this truly comparable to Presley, a dolphin at the New York Aquarium, who, without any rewards or instructions, reacted to being marked with paint by taking off at full speed to a distant part of his tank where a mirror was mounted? There he would spin round and round the way we do in a dressing room, appearing to check himself out.

The mirror test was set up by Diana Reiss and Lori Marino. Their variation on the rouge test was actually more rigorous than such tests on children and apes, because it included a “sham” mark. They first put an invisible mark on two captive-bred dolphins, using water instead of paint, before they used visible marks. For the rouge test it is critical to mark a part of the body (such as right above the eye) that is invisible without guidance of a mirror. The only way the animal should be able to figure out that it has been marked is by seeing itself in the mirror and connecting its reflection with its own body.

The dolphins spent far more time near the mirror, inspecting their reflection, when they had been visibly marked than when they
had been sham marked. They seemed to recognize that the mark they saw in the mirror had been put on their own body. Since they hardly paid any attention to marks on other dolphins, it was not as if they were obsessed with marks in general. They were specifically interested in the ones on themselves. Critics complained that the dolphins in this study failed to touch their own body. or rub off the mark, as humans or apes do, but I’m not sure we should hold the absence of self-touching against an animal that lacks the anatomy for it. Until better tests have been designed, it seems safe to let dolphins join the cognitive elite of animals that recognize themselves in a mirror.

Dolphins possess large brains (larger than humans, in fact), and show every sign of high intelligence. Each individual produces its own unique whistle sound by which the others recognize him or her, and there are even indications that they use these sounds to call each other “by name,” so to speak. They enjoy lifelong bonds, and reconcile after fights by means of sexy petting (much like bonobos), while males form power-seeking coalitions. They may encircle a school of herring to drive them together in a compact ball, releasing bubbles to keep them in place, after which they pick their food like fruit from a tree.

In captivity, dolphins have been known to outsmart their keepers. Trained to collect debris from her tank, one dolphin was amassing more and more fish rewards until her charade was exposed. She was hiding large items, such as newspapers and cardboard boxes, deep underwater only to rip small pieces from them, bringing these to her trainer one by one.

There are tons of such observations—glia or no glia. Still, I must admit that the whole fat-brain affair, which rightly upset dolphin experts, provided me with some fresh insights. From now on, if I find my goldfish thrashing on the floor, I’ll have to congratulate it before dropping it back into its bowl.

With regard to the co-emergence hypothesis, it is important to note the level of dolphin altruism. Does self-awareness go hand
in hand with perspective-taking, and do dolphins show the sort of targeted helping known of humans and apes? One of the oldest reports in the scientific literature concerns an incident on October 30, 1954, off the coast of Florida. During a capture expedition for a public aquarium, a stick of dynamite was set off underwater near a pod of bottlenose dolphins. As soon as one stunned victim surfaced, heavily listing, two other dolphins came to its aid: “One came up from below on each side, and placing the upper lateral part of their heads approximately beneath the pectoral fins of the injured one, they buoyed it to the surface in an apparent effort to allow it to breathe while it remained partially stunned.” The two helpers were submerged, which meant that they couldn’t breathe during their effort. The entire pod remained nearby (whereas normally they’d take off immediately after an explosion), and waited until their companion had recovered. They then all fled in a hurry, making tremendous leaps. The scientists reporting this incident added: “There is no doubt in our minds that the cooperative assistance displayed for their own species was real and deliberate.”

Two dolphins were seen supporting a third, which they took between them. They buoyed the stunned victim so that its blowhole was above the surface, whereas their own blowholes were not.

Reports of leviathan care and assistance go back to the ancient Greeks. Whales may interpose themselves between a hunter’s boat and an injured companion, or capsize the boat. In fact, their tendency to come to the defense of victims is so predictable that whalers take advantage of it. Once a pod of sperm whales is sighted, the gunner only needs to strike one among them. When other pod members encircle the ship, splashing the water with their flukes, or surround the injured whale in a flowerlike formation known as “the marguerite,” the gunner has no trouble picking them off one by one. Such sympathy entrapment would work with few other animals.