Beauty

Fields Converging: Mirror Neurons and Mimetic Desire and the "Self"

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rearview Poets and mystics have always known that beneath the skim of the observable lies a schema, a web, an indefinable something, that ties us all together in ways that precede reason and our very “selves.” In other words, they have always known that the “autonomous self” is a phantom.

Rene Girard’s theory of mimetic desire uncovered more than a corner this “something,” and his eminent disciple and interpreter James Alison–Grow Mercy’s inspiration–gave us ways to speak of and begin to integrate this social-constructing-something, this unifying-like-principle-in-need-redemption into our faith.

Fields converge. Now, (giving scientific credence to Girard’s anthropological/psychological soundings) three Italian neuroscientists have lifted the hem high.

In 1996 it happened that a team of neuroscientists at the University of Parma, Italy, were studying premotor neuron dynamics. They had run electrodes into a few individual neurons in a macaque monkey’s premotor cortex (in humans, centers for pain, empathy, language) to monitor neural activity as the monkey reached for different objects. The eureka moment came when one of the scientists walked into the room where the monkey was and reached out and picked up a raisin. As the monkey watched, its premotor neurons fired just as they had when the monkey had picked up the raisin. They were astonished. What they had witnessed was a sort of sympathetic, observation-driven firing of neurons. It had always been held that these neurons fired only in action. But after replicating the experiment many times and many ways they realized they had discovered something new. The team, Giaocomo Rizzolatti, Vittorio Gallese, and Leonardo Fogassi later named these mirror neurons.

Much has happened in a decade and the research is finally filtering down.
Researchers, using brain imaging rather than electrodes, have found human mirror-neuron systems more robust and numerous than those of monkeys and existing not just in the premotor cortex. (i.e. The inferior parietal areas, the posterior parietal lobe, the superior temporal sulcus, and the insula. David Dobbs)

What is the relevance of all this? Here’s a thought from V.S. Ramachandran, professor of Neuroscience and Psychology and Director of Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California:

The discovery of mirror neurons in the frontal lobes of monkeys, and their potential relevance to human brain evolution is the single most important “unpublicized” story of the decade. I predict that mirror neurons will do for psychology what DNA did for biology: they will provide a unifying framework and help explain a host of mental abilities that have hitherto remained mysterious and inaccessible to experiments.

Of course mystics didn’t need proof, but neuroscientists may now be giving us cause enough to finally put the autonomous self out of it’s misery. And this is only one humanizing benefit coming out of this breaking discovery.

More to come…

Spirituality

Diary of a Country Priest

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Near the end of Georges Bernanos’ “Diary of a Country Priest,” are these words:

How easy it is to hate oneself! True grace is to forget. Yet if pride could die in us, the supreme grace would be to love oneself in all simplicity…

The “diary” is an occasionally bucolic, sometimes strange and often tragic journey of a young priest who finally falls into this “supreme grace,” and discovers,

I am reconciled to myself, to the poor, poor shell of me.

And that is the magic of the book. It reminded me, yet again, that a thousand messages, benevolent and conflicting, have formed a “me” that regards “me” with a mix of disdain and loathing, mercy and affection. To which side of this inner bearing I move–to self-hate, or to self-reconciliation–determines the health of “me” and the health of every one of my relationships. (Which is essentially the same thing, because, far more than I know, I am my relationships.)

The novel ends with these words. “Does it matter? Grace is everywhere…” Of course, if grace is everywhere, my fragile and occasionally desperate project of seeking approval from all the right quarters doesn’t matter at all. I can simply (simple is not easy), in all simplicity, resign myself to the grace that is here.  

—–

A friend told me that this was Brennan Manning’s favorite book. And in fact, in the novel, the young priest is often called a ‘ragamuffin priest’ by his superior. No doubt this inspired Manning’s popular, “Ragamuffin Gospel.” A book that was vilified by Fundamentalists.

Beauty/Christianity

Starbucks Log: Do you Conga?

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They’re playing James Taylor in Starbucks these days. Always good to be reminded that “You’ve Got a Friend.”

Yesterday I bought a hot chocolate for a young man who obviously spent the night outside. He was in Starbucks occupying himself with a glass of water. Beyond the obvious incongruity of looking like you live outside, try sitting in Starbucks without a drink and see if you don’t stick out?

He sipped the hot drink through the topping then retrieved a straw to spoon the whipped cream into his mouth. When he spilled a few drops of chocolate he instinctively bent to lick it off the table top.

This morning I read about a place where everyone will have a home. A place where, we are promised, “there are many dwelling places,” and that, “if it wasn’t so we would not have been told (G-of-John).” A promise kept, regarding housing. How refreshing is that?

The day before that I read Jesus’ comment that we would always have the poor among us. Charge me with heterodoxy but remember who Jesus was talking to when he said this. It was of course the fastidious Judas. The cunning keeper of the books. Is it any wonder with people like Judas keeping accounts that poverty flourishes, that the poor remain? 

dancing-outside-at-night It has started to snow. I watch as headlights round 109th and see a sudden swirl of luminous flakes brought into relief and mirror-ball the entire intersection. It’s early Tuesday morning but Taylor is singing “Steamroller” and I can almost imagine a dance breaking out under the new incandescence of Jasper and 9th.

What say?…one cold snowy December morning we beg or steal all the patio gas heaters, set them up on their poles all along the downtown streets and avenues, then call all the libidinous young men who always have sub-woofers in the trunks of their cars, give them only Taj Mahal CD’s to play, and take a conga-line to work.

(By the way, you can blame the snow on me, I wore sandals today.)