#18: Vittorio Gallese
We Are Relational Beings

Intro: One of the many lessons we can learn about ourselves, we are intrinsically, deeply, constitutively relational creatures. So relation is at the basis of who we are, of who we were, who we are, and who we will become tomorrow or in one hundred years. Relation is fundamental. AskDifferent, the podcast by the Einstein Foundation with Leon Stebe.
Leon Stebe: Can you remember how you learned to dance with somebody? Do you know where your value system came from? And could you recall who taught you how to do the job you do today? Mirror neurons in our brains could have an important influence, and my guest today is one of the discoverers of these mirror neurons. Vittorio Gallese is Professor of Psychobiology at the University of Parma. He is a former Einstein Visiting Vellow at the Berlin School of Mind and Brain. And it's a great pleasure to have him here on the show. Welcome, Mr. Gallese, buongiorno, and hello from Berlin.
Vittorio Gallese: Guten Tag.
Stebe: We all have to exercise social distancing in these special times, still in the midst of a pandemic, and we all miss a lot of things right now. Mr. Gallese, what do you miss the most in these days?
Gallese: Well, of course, social contacts, social events, meeting with my coworkers in the lab, meeting the students, meeting my friends, having a spritz on Friday night, having dinner on Saturday night in a nice restaurant, being able to move and travel at my leisure. This is gone for the time being since a year already, and it's really demanding. I think what we are going through is something not very different from a traumatic event, with a different impact on different people at different ages, but we are all impacted by the pandemic in a way or the other, not exactly in a good way.
Stebe: I expected from you that it is the classical music you miss the most, to hear and see a Verdi opera in a concert hall.
Gallese: Yes. Indeed. I mean, I'm listening to music, however, not live, of course. The last chance we had was during the International Verdi Festival in Parma, where with enormous efforts the first three or four nights we were able to attend, en plein air, so to speak, in a beautiful park right at the center of the city, where we had the staging of an opera and Verdi's Requiem. Then the weather decidedly forced us to go indoors with a much more limited number of seats than those available in the open air. And then, so far, nothing happened. It's just streaming, streaming, streaming, and nobody knows for sure when theaters and concert halls will be able to reopen.
Stebe: What is happening in your brain at the moment you hear an opera by Verdi?
Gallese: Well, it depends on the performance. If it's a bad performance, my brain switches to anger. I'm joking. Well, in topical moments when the performance is particularly good, I mean, I feel pleasure, I feel moved, sometimes moved to tears. In particular moments of particular operas, Traviata, for example, is a prototype. With a good cast and a good conductor and a good staging, I can easily be driven to tears.
Stebe: And there are a lot of things we miss right now. Concerts, live music, celebrations, personal meetings. What is happening in our brains in this challenging time of social distancing from your perspective as a neuroscientist?
Gallese: Well, what exactly happens in our brain is to be studied, the role once the condition will enable it. As we speak, most of the studies on the impact of the pandemic on people, psychic well-being or, so to speak, the general psychological condition of the people are tested, are investigated, by means of online studies. We recently published one of those online studies on the role of facial masks in determining social distancing, empathic proclivity towards others, emotional recognition, but you don't know anything about what's going on in the brain. You have responses. At best, you may record the reaction times, but you don't have any access from remote, of course, for very good reasons on what's going on people's brain. Broadly speaking, in very general terms, for sure our brain is adapting to this new situation because we know it very well. It's a very plastic organ. Even in adulthood, we can learn to do things we weren't able to do beforehand. My father, who unfortunately passed away last year, he learned how to use a portable laptop and the social networks when he was already in his nineties, nineties! He took a course for elderly people. He learned how to use it, and he enjoyed enormously to Skype with his grandchildren when we were abroad with myself, when I was in London, working in London or in Berlin. We were seeing one another on a daily basis through Skype. It was ’94, ‘95. So our brain is trying to cope, like the rest of our body, of course, with this planetary stress test. And, we are, indeed… A philosopher in Italy suggested that what we are currently experiencing because of the pandemics is a sort of Brechtian estrangement effect, because every single habit, action, anything that has to do with our daily life needs to be carefully scrutinized, double-checked to test whether it complies with the safety rules. Am I wearing the facial mask? Did I take the sanitizer with me? Do I have documents to testify why I'm in this part of the city and to the world or whatever? I mean, everything. Doing your shopping, wearing gloves, where to dispose the gloves and the facial masks. How distant would it be reasonably safe to stay while queuing outside of a shop or a supermarket? Shall I take the bus or not? Would it be worth saving that long walk or instead it's better to stay away from people? We are constantly asking ourselves this kind of question 24 hours a day since almost a year. This clearly has an impact on how we see things, on how we relate to others, on how we think about others, and it will likely have it for the coming months. It would take time to readjust, to see in a crowd an opportunity and not something to stay away from. I mean, I don't know how about you, but we were watching movies in TV recently and with my wife, who is also a colleague, Alessandro Milton, we were commenting on scenes that we would normally take as the rule, seeing people crowded in a pub enjoying their drink on Friday night, how scary it looks like nowadays. A mixture between scary and, unheimlich, if you know what I mean.
Stebe: Of course, unheimlich. And it's a stress test you already mentioned. Do we lose a part of our empathy for others right now because we are not meeting people in person, and in many cases, we are just using digital ways to communicate with each other?
Gallese: No. I wouldn't say that we become less empathic. Certainly, we are getting used to relate to others through this digital media, but we I think we are doing our best to colonize this new social mediation with what we are bringing with us, which is the outcome of the non-digital way of being related to others. And, indeed, I was conducting a webinar a couple of weeks ago. All of a sudden, almost close to the end, we were in question-and-answer time, and we had a Zoom bombing. So some people intruded making silly jokes, playing loud music, it lasted two minutes, then we were able to get them out. But what everybody felt was a kind of intrusion, almost like someone is all of a sudden breaking into the space where you are hosting your guests. So I think there is a kind of psychological projection we are constantly doing. So even if we are inhabiting virtual spaces like the one enabling the two of us to have this conversation, nevertheless we project into this virtual space many of the characteristics that normally qualify a physical meeting place, a dwelling, so to speak, where we have our social relationship with others. It's clearly something that … it isn't as if, it is a temporary techno-prosthesis enabling part of our social life to continue. I think, it has also a role of, like a pharmacon. You know, the pharmacon is double edged. It cures you, but it's poisonous at the same time. I think this perfectly matches the role of new digital media in contemporary times, in what we are all experiencing. It's a sort of pharmacon. It enables us to keep our social ties almost intact or not so much reduced, but at the same time, it's slowly, perhaps, at the very least, I see this risk in principle of poisoning our natural inclination to be out among the people. So particularly for people of my age, I'm not thinking about young people. Young people are very traumatized by this situation because you're a teenager only once in your life. All these months are gone for them. There’s no way to recover those lost months of bonfires, of enjoying the company of your friend, crowding a disco or whatever. So, anyway, for people of my age, the poisonous side of the story is that you become lazy and think you can develop delusional things that, after a while, why to bother traveling, why to bother wasting your time when the other is at your click? So there are many dangers ahead, and we should, we should be wary of this potential risk.
Stebe: Looking back 30 years ago, you and your colleagues in Parma made this great discovery. You uncovered mirror neurons in little monkeys. Can you describe what it was like back then? How do you find this mechanism in our brains?
Gallese: Well, we were investigating to which extent the motor system is open to sensory inputs. We were studying the visual properties of motor neurons in the ventral premotor cortex, and we were particularly studying a class of neurons that we later on designated as canonical neurons. Neurons that guide our interactions with manipulable object, but at the same time, this very same neuron would respond, would fire, as we say, with their spikes when the Macaque was merely looking at the object. And these properties were later on demonstrated also in our brain. It's part of what we call the visual motor transformation. In order to grab objects properly, proficiently, skillfully, your motor system needs to know in advance how the object looks like, how big it is, what is the orientation, so that your hand will shape correctly while traveling towards the object and safely accomplish the goal that led you to move your hand toward the object. So we were grasping object and showing them to the Macaque from a distance, testing whether the neuron would fire or not to this visual presentation. And all of a sudden, we realized that some of these neurons were not discharging as we expected at the right moment when we presented the object to the Macaque, so that the monkey could see it, but right at the moment when we grasped the object before showing it. And at first, we were skeptical. We thought it was something we didn't check for properly. Say, the Macaque is moving, we don't see it, so we are not measuring a genuine visual response, or many other alternative explanations like you usually do in a lab, you know? You try to falsify your hypothesis to test whether there are simpler and less exciting answers. And once we were sure that all these alternative explanations could be ruled out, I should say that we got pretty much excited very early on because we intuited that we were on something unprecedented, unexpected, but that could reveal at the very basic level a neurophysiological mechanism linking individuals. So, in principle, enabling imitation, enabling a low level implicit experiential form of understanding what others are doing. And from the very beginning, our immediate goal was to test, to verify whether a similar mechanism could be revealed also in the human brain, which, by the way, turned out to be the case.
Stebe: How do you deal as a scientist at that very moment with doubts and maybe setbacks?
Gallese: Well, that's part of the business. I mean, you're never 100% sure whether the way you make sense of the data you are collecting is true or not. For example, one of the reasons why you need to replicate your results if you're doing animal research in a second animal is just to minimize the risk that for some unknown factor what you are dealing with is not a genuine phenomenon, so you need to replicate it. And so scientific replication, nowadays as we speak, is a big issue. So a certain level of anxiety about the correctness of your interpretation always remains. And to be honest, when other labs were confirming independently our results, I was very happy of that. It was a kind of further confirmation that what we saw was not a delusion, that it was true, that it was genuinely an important phenomenon. And, I should say the more the time goes by, the more I'm convinced that our discovery was indeed a great discovery.
Stebe: The title of our podcast series is AskDifferent. At that time, you asked different. I assume it was a time full of excitement because you have asked different and you have been able to get a whole new perspective. Right?
Gallese: Indeed. Indeed. I mean, if you Google social neuroscience, you find very little entries, if any, before 1995, 1996, when the two full papers on mirror neurons, the first short one appeared in '92, but the first two full papers appeared in 1996. So, from then onwards people in cognitive neuroscience began thinking differently, and the dyadic relationship between individuals became a hot topic of investigation. So I think it changed people's perspective. Like most of the time, when you decide to not be happy with the mainstream story about anything and you decide to scrutinize it from within and see whether what everybody takes for granted, merits such a kind of stamp of unquestionable truth. Very seldom truth is unquestionable in our domain.
Stebe: What did mirror neurons teach you about life?
Gallese: What teaches us about ourself, perhaps it teaches us … is one of the many lesson we can learn about our ourselves. We are intrinsically, deeply, constitutively relational creatures. So relation is at the basis of who we are, of who we were, who we are, and who we will become tomorrow or in one hundred years. Relation is fundamental. In principle is relation, wrote Martin Buber in 1923 in “Ich und du”, and I think he was damn right. And now we are discovering these already intuited ideas about mankind with different levels of description, with different tools, with in my case, with the tools of neuroscience, but all these sources of evidence converge. I mean, we are relational creatures and the mirroring mechanism is one of the neurophysiological mechanisms that testify that it's a kind of fractal quality of human nature.
Stebe: And how important is this discovery in our brains for society as a whole? I mean, for the sense of solidarity, fellowship, for empathy in society?
Gallese: Well, this is a very delicate territory prone very easily to misunderstanding. I don't think that mirror neurons have anything to do with sympathy, altruism, fellow feeling. That deals with sympathy. Sympathy means feeling for someone. I relate the mirroring mechanism more to Einfühlung, so feeling with someone or mitfühlen. We are dealing with different notions. I think in order to be sympathetic I think you have to be empathic, but you can be empathic without necessarily being sympathetic. So whenever I read nature makes us good because nature gives us mirror neurons, it's culture making us bad, I don't buy that. That's not what I believe. I think, mimesis, empathy, the possibility to have a direct relation to the inner world partial, direct relation to the inner world of the of the other doesn't make us necessarily good. I mean, we can actually use our empathy to manipulate others. We can use empathy to get pleasure from the pain that we produce in our victim, like in the case of sadism. So I think, we shouldn't mix empathy and sympathy.
Stebe: And what impact do emotions have in, for example, politics?
Gallese: Enormous. Enormous. I would say that particularly, when politics uses more and more digital disintermediation, so politicians speak directly to their electorate. We know mediation by means of journalists asking them burning questions, the kind of rough talk, which is, I think, it's a sign of good health of a democracy. But when you post to a politician difficult question, not when the politician is able directly with no mediation to tell you all the fantasies or all the slogans that are specifically tailored, to match the potential electorate expectations. So the impact of emotion is enormous, like enormous is the level of implicit conditioning that we have through the algorithm that presides over what appears every single minute on our desktop when we surf the web or when we are using social networks. I've been writing about this in the last two years or so. I think that aesthetics is one of the key areas of investigation, of multidisciplinary investigation to understand our times. I think we live in an aesthetic world. We live in an aestheticized world, and the more we know about digital aesthetic, because this aesthetic becomes also a sort of ethic. So there is a great ethical import of aestheticization. Right? Aestheticization of social relations, politics, information, news, education. Everything is channeled by this intermediation, and that's aesthetized a lot of phenomena, a lot more than 20 years ago. We should be aware of that.
Stebe: And that's very interesting. You said that we all have this kind of mechanism in our brains and then nowadays we are talking about the problem that the society is becoming more fragmented and we all live in our echo chambers and social bubbles. Is this a contradiction?
Gallese: Well, indeed, I am organizing a series of webinar on screens, and two seminars ago, there was a very interesting talk given by Professor Ophelia Deroy, who's a professor of Philosophy of Neuroscience in Ludwig Universität in Munich. She has a view on the digital bubble less one sided, the more nuanced. So in a way, there is indeed, that's her opinion, the dimension of the echo chamber that you were mentioning. So in a way to massively diffuse conformism, so to speak, and being less used to accept the challenge of different opinions in a correct political dialectic game, so to speak. She emphasizes the fact that by means of bubbles, we find common ground with other people. And so, it is not negative, intrinsically. That's how professor Deroy sees things. I think you have both aspects. It also very much depends on how slave you are of your own very limited social bubble and how dare you to be bold enough to look also what's outside your bubble. That very much depends on idiosyncratic interest, curiosities that might be very different from people to people. So it's hard to generalize, even here.
Stebe: You made such a huge significant contribution in the field of neuroscience. But at the beginning, as a young scientist, it wasn't that easy for you because I read you did your research work without salary. Right? And you worked as a doctor in a prison.
Gallese: Yes. I worked in a jailhouse as a doctor for five long years. Then I took off. Finally, there was a fellowship in Japan, originally for one year. Then, it became two years in Tokyo, enormously enriching where I could do my work full-time. But back then, when we discovered mirror neurons, back then, we had no salaries. We were working full-time because I did my night call and weekend call in the jailhouse just to be free during the weekdays, and we were around the clock in the lab with no salary. I mean, our salary was the excitement and the love for research, but to be honest, yes. Even back then, times weren’t exactly easy for beginners. Like, they aren't easy, unfortunately, as we speak.
Stebe: And how challenging was this period in this early scientific life for you?
Gallese: Well, it was wonderful. It was great excitement. And you see, independently from the remarkable outcome that we had in the early nineties, I mean, the work in itself is enormously rewarding, but no single day is equal to the previous day or the next day. I mean, you're constantly facing the challenges, technical challenges, of all sorts, unexpected results. For example, you run an experiment for a given purpose, but preliminary data show you something you didn't expect, and that might push you to entirely revise your schedule because these new findings are more interesting than the thing you were expecting to investigate. So there is an enormous freedom, great freedom, sense of freedom. It's you, it’s just you in the lab with your teammate that decide what to do, how to do it, for how long doing it, and why. I mean, it's the most beautiful thing in the world. And if I see something, let me do the old guy's talk now. I mean, all this enthusiasm is systematically curved, suffocated by the tons of bureaucratic forms we are inundated on a daily basis. We turn the academia, which was the space for creativeness, for freedom, for transmitting this knowledge and enthusiasm to the younger generation into a self-evaluating machine. This is completely crazy. I spend most of my time filling forms, around the clock. And sometimes I wonder if I put nonsensical words into those forms, would anybody find out later on? I don't think so. These are self-perpetuating, bureaucratic Moloch that doesn't serve the purposes for what it has been thought of, I think.
Stebe: And what would be your advice for students, for young scientists? Many of them are struggling because the scientific path is not that easy. As you mentioned, what be your most important advice for them then?
Gallese: Follow your passion, your enthusiasm. Look for people who can transmit you positive thinking and enthusiasm. Besides, of course, the financial opportunities to support a fellowship or a PhD fellowship or whatever. But look for enthusiasm, and it is a hard, a difficult career, but that enormously pays back all the effort. It is worth your efforts if you really believe in it. So, don't be discouraged. Everybody has faced difficulties. Everybody has had experiments that screw up or papers being rejected, grant being rejected and the like. It's part of this world, but if you follow your enthusiasm in the long run, most of the time, you will succeed. That's what I experienced in my life and in the life of many colleagues of mine that I met.
Stebe: So follow your enthusiasm.
Gallese: Yes.
Stebe: What a great advice. Thank you so much. Vittorio Gallese, Professor of Psychobiology at the University of Parma, former Einstein Visiting Fellow at the Berlin School of Mind and Brain. Thank you for your time for this great exchange. And grazie mille.
Gallese: Thank you and auf Wiedersehen Berlin.
Stebe: Auf Wiedersehen in Berlin. And this was this episode of AskDifferent, the podcast from the Einstein Foundation. My name is Leon Stebe. Thank you for listening. Please subscribe this podcast, and please tune in next time. Till then, and bye bye.