THE ROUGH GUIDE TO PSYCHOLOGYdoom-mongering. Even some scientists, who should know better,
have predicted that the Facebook generation will be more atomized
and lonely than earlier generations. In their eyes, digital interactions
displace “genuine” face-to-face contact, to the detriment of relation-
ships. The actual psychological evidence, however, is more nuanced
and in most cases suggests Internet-based socializing can have
its benefits.
Early seeds of concern about time spent on the Internet were sown in
the late 1990s, when Robert Kraut and his colleagues at Carnegie Mellon
University spent two years looking at the effect of Internet time on fami-
lies living in Pittsburgh. Their study appeared to show that the more
time the participants spent online (mostly for communication purposes),
the less time they spent talking face-to-face with their families and the
Mirror neurons
Successful relationships depend on us empathizing with one another,
a skill that some scientists believe lies in the power of so-called “mirror
neurons”. These are cells identified in the forebrains of monkeys that
are active both when a given action is performed and when that action
is witnessed. The idea is that by simulating the emotions and actions of
another, the cells can help us better understand what the other person
was feeling and trying to achieve.
Mirror neurons were discovered, fortuitously, by Giacomo Rizzolatti
and colleagues at the University of Palma in Italy in the 1990s. The
researchers had implanted electrodes into monkeys’ brains to find out
how different brain cells were activated when they performed certain
actions. According to science writer David Dobbs, team member
Leonardo Fogassi entered the lab one day and happened to reach for
the monkeys’ raisins – it was then that the researchers realized that
observing Fogassi perform this act led the same monkey neurons
to fire as when the monkeys made the same rasin-reach movement
themselves.
Brain-imaging experiments have since uncovered what seem to be
mirror neurons in the brains of humans. The same patterns of activity
are triggered in these cells both when we execute and witness a given
action or facial expression. In fact, even hearing the description of
a certain action appears to lead our postulated mirror-neurons to
simulate the act in our own minds.
In 2010 Roy Mukamel and his colleagues at UCLA claimed to have
found the first direct evidence for mirror neurons in humans, recorded
from electrodes implanted into the brains of patients with epilepsy.
The electrodes were being used principally for clinical reasons, but