It all began with a little theatre play.
Three women working in neuroscience walk into the stage. They have to decide what will be the topic of the next Ar Event. After some discussion, they settle on the theatre. How does neuroscience explain what happens when people watch actors perform?, they want to know. So they put their white labcoats on to better think scientifically.
They first read all the scientific literature concerning theatre, “to see whether anyone has ever thought of this problem before and got to any conclusion”. Then they perform experiments, analyse the data.
They devise a formula meant to explain it all: “Theatre equals: A plays B while C watches”. But this formula just states the obvious. “We went through all this work to get ‘A plays B while C watches’?”, they exclaim, disappointed.
“What about A?”, the scientists then ponder. “Poor A! We lost her! Exactly! Who is A when it's playing B? Where is her identity?”. It now becomes obvious to them that what we call “sense of self” has to be a part of the answer to their question.
Other things have to be involved, too: emotions, empathy, the sense of reward. “Mirror neurons!”, exclaims one of the scientists. “You know, the ones that get activated when you perform an action, but also while you watch others perform the same action? Perhaps similar mechanisms are involved when you get emotional while you watch others get emotional on stage!”
“Maybe theater is really about human connections”, they conclude, “what we have in common and what sets us apart. It plays with our empathy towards others to thread a connection to other realities. So we can pull you into this reality, so you can step into this story, so we can be in each other's stories.”
The three scientist-actresses – who have truly managed, for a few minutes, to pull us into their story – are actually the three hosts of the evening: Daniela Pereira, a researcher at the Champalimaud Foundation’s (CF) Neural Circuits Dysfunction Lab; Luisa Vasconcelos, leader of the CF’s Innate Behaviour Lab; and Maria Vito, head of the Glass Wash and Media Preparation Platform.
Mirror neurons everywhere
The event included two invited speakers – two scientists known for their work on empathy and sense of self. The first one was Christian Keysers, a French/German neuroscientist at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience. His work has extended the notion of mirror neurons from the motor system to the tactile and limbic systems, enhancing our understanding of the neural basis of empathy, as Daniela Pereira pointed out.
Keysers started by projecting a famous scene from “Dr. No”, the first-ever James Bond movie from 1962, where actor Sean Connery finds himself in bed with a tarantula. “What I think is remarkable about our experience of movies”, he said, “is that when we witness James Bond fighting with a tarantula, we don't just understand what he's going through. We get tense ourselves. We sometimes start to sweat. And if you don't like spiders, seeing him with the spider on the chest can be almost unbearable to watch.”
He went on: “Now, the question for me is, really, what happens in your brain for you to not just see and understand what happens to Bond, but to become part of his predicament?” Why is it that, when you see the spider crawl on Bond’s chest, your brain will transform it into the kind of sensation you could feel yourself?
Keysers then described his extensive work on mirror neurons associated with motor tasks, sensations (being touched) and emotions (disgust and pain) – in monkeys, humans and rats. Mirror neurons were respectively found in the motor cortex for actions; in the somatosensory system for sensations; and, for emotions, in the limbic system, the insula and the anterior cingulate cortex, all brain regions that are associated with emotional responses.
These neurons are at the root of empathy. “Imitating the action within you allows you to stop just seeing me doing something and start to really feel what I'm going through. We have a brain that's wired to transform what we see others do into how we would do it ourselves.” More precisely, he added, we project into the other’s mind what we would do and feel in their stead.
“If you are very similar to the other person, this projection is a very good imitation of what goes on in the other, and you really feel with the other”, Keysers continued. “That’s why, in theatre plays or movies, what’s important is to make you feel that the main character is someone a bit like you, someone of your ‘in-group’, and then you can really empathize with them.”
To wrap up his talk, Keysers asked: do we actually control our empathy or is it something that just happens to us? His team studied psychopathic criminals and concluded that they do terrible things because they don't feel the pain that they inflict on others. Astonishingly, the team also showed that psychopathic criminals could be more empathetic if they put an effort into it. “Their problem is not that they're incapable of empathy, but that they do not use their ability as spontaneously as you or I would”, Keysers said.
But the opposite is also true, as other experiments showed: “Empathy is not something that you simply have a lot of or not. It's not like you are an empathic person or not, you actually have the choice at every moment to turn your empathy on or off”, Keysers said. “I think this is a responsibility that we should all take very seriously.”
Acting and the sense of self
The second speaker was Dwaynica Greaves, from University College London's Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, who investigates the effects of theatrical training on performing actors’ sense of self.
What is the sense of self?, she asked. “I chose the psychoanalytical definition: it is the ability to have a conscious, pre-conscious, and unconscious experience of yourself as an entity that is different from another living person or organism. So, I know that I'm me, I know that I'm not you. You know that you're not me, I know that I'm not this monitor, right?” And the sense of self goes deeper than that, she said, because it persists even when you're dreaming.
Two interesting types of selves are the phenomenal self, which is the bodily self, the actual physical self that you can see, touch, feel. And there’s the narrative self, our socially constructed self.
Why study actors?, Greaves asked. “Aside from the fact that I genuinely have liked theatre and acting since I was a child, there's actually a scientific reason as to why I'm interested in actors: they use many different techniques to get into character for their performances.” In the process of learning how to act, actors use their own phenomenal and narrative selves to create a phenomenal self and a narrative self for their character.
How can we measure the sense of self as a neuroscientist? When she looked through the literature, Greaves found that there was a lot of research using fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) to measure activity in the brain. And in particular, studies showed that, in a brain area called the medial prefrontal cortex (which plays an essential role in self-awareness), hearing of our own name elicits a stronger neural response than hearing any other name. This was clearly the sense of self at work.
“There's not a lot of research that's actually done looking at theatre and neuroscience and bringing them together”, she said. “We wanted to build a big study by having an actual theatre performance and measuring the actors' brains in the rehearsal period.” Could the actors actually manipulate their sense of self when performing?
“We hypothesised that when an actor is not acting, she is just basically herself”, Greaves explained. “So the representation of her own name in the medial prefrontal cortex should be much stronger. Conversely, when acting, this stronger response might be suppressed.”
Working with the Flute Theatre – a London-based company that specialises in creating productions of Shakespeare for autistic people – and using brain imaging wearable devices and some novel techniques (such as functional near infrared spectroscopy), the researchers measured the brain activity of several actors rehearsing scenes from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
They found that, during their performance, the actors’ neural response to the shouting of their own name was not as strong as when they were not acting. This effect was recorded on a brain area close to the medial prefrontal cortex. Greaves noted that a larger and different study would be needed to obtain better-quality data and further clarify the issue.
What really interests her most about this work is the fact that it can actually give us some information about what happens to actors, to human behavior, during theatrical performances. What could be the consequences of tinkering with one’s sense of self? “I wonder how acting affects the people who actually have to perform and live through the performance”, she said. “That's what really, really drives my research and what I do.”
Playback theatre and grand finale
Next on stage was the InVerso theater group – three actors and a musician led by director and actress Elsa Maurício Childs, for a “playback theater” performance. Playback theater is a form of improvisation in which people from the audience tell a story from their lives that is then enacted on the fly. Several people candidly contributed episodes from their own experience, or even dreams, some of which were poignant.
This was followed by an overview of the answers given online by the public, when they registered, to questions from the organisers. Some figures: about 25% of the audience were people working in science research, and a number of people in theatre and film, or both, the rest in neither. Many people said they go to the theater or to the cinema at least once a year.
Finally, words people had associated with “theatre” in their answers were specific actors’ names or their work, movement, dynamism, physical interaction, entertainment, laughter, relaxation, well-being, therapy, happiness, communication and storytelling, mirroring life, artificiality and exaggeration. Also empathy, emotions, increased self-awareness – and Shakespeare.
A round-table ended the event, speakers and organisers coming together on stage to ask and answer questions about the evening’s topic.
One of them was: can theater mess with our empathy or influence our empathic skills? “I'm a little biased to answer this question, because the form of theater that I do the most is all about empathy”, Childs replied. “It's all about hearing the personal story of the person in front of you, getting in their shoes and actually playing it out to the best of your abilities in that moment, respecting its deepest note and everything about this teller that has made him or herself vulnerable to you. But I don't think it messes with our sense of self. I think it actually increases it.”
“If we go back to the narrative self I was speaking about before”, said Greaves, “interacting with people as you go through the world changes you for good or for bad – it shapes who you are. If you watch a piece of theatre, or if you're involved in a piece of theatre, that is also a part of your life.” In other words, any experience could potentially “mess with” our sense of self – not just theatre.
Another question: can watching a play or a movie change our empathic skills?. This was specifically directed at Keysers. His answer: “I think what is important for developing your empathy is the fact that empathy can be rewarding. And very few things are as rewarding as seeing a good play or a good movie in which you open yourself to empathy. It is by having these positive experiences that you open up to what other people think, and can really go deep, listen deeply, and get moved by others.
Is empathy good or bad?, was another question addressed to Keysers. “Empathy is neither good nor bad in absolute terms. It always depends on the situation”, he replied.
“If you're a surgeon, and being too empathic gets in the way of doing what you have to do, that's bad. Just being empathic in the face of distress doesn’t help in the long run. Empathy can also be used to manipulate others, like a commercial that prompts people to smoke more.”
“But there are many other situations in which empathy is really incredibly important,” Keysers added. “So I think what is important is to learn to understand when empathy is good and when it is bad, to turn it on when it’s good, and to make sure that you control it when it leads you to do the wrong thing.”
And finally, what can theater and neuroscience tell us about everyday interactions with those around us? “Neuroscience helps explain the world in a way that we, lay people, are not used to”, said Childs. “But theater, I think, allows us to live other people's stories, be they fictional or not. We are social beings, so this form of art is the basis of life.”
Text by Ana Gerschenfeld, Health & Science Writer of the Champalimaud Foundation.
