Children, Compassion and the Brain I: Early Childhood and Mirror Neurons

I feel lucky to be one of the thousands of people who heard the Dalai Lama speak during Seeds of Compassion, a 5-day Seattle event focused on teaching children and adults to practice compassion. In addition to Saturday's feature event at Qwest field, I attended a panel entitled The Scientific Basis for Compassion, which featured the Dalai Lama and assorted specialists in behavioral neuroscience and psychology.

Friday's event was a treat for anyone interested in neuroscience and child development. The panelists and the Dalai Lama passed insights, questions, and occasional giggles back and forth as they explored what makes children develop and retain compassion, and why compassion is urgent in today's world. The presenters emphasized that compassion is necessary for a healthy world, that we all have the inborn capacity for compassion, and that for that capacity to be realized, we need love and nurturing from an early age.

The way we interact with and behave around children and youth strongly shapes their own ability to be, or not to be, compassionate. There is a strong connection between brain development and compassion.

In early childhood, babies' mirror neurons* are actively developing and shaping connections. These are the neurons that allow babies to imitate other people's actions, feelings, and experiences. The amazing thing about mirror neurons (in babies and adults) is that when we perceive someone doing something (feeling happy, eating ice cream, etc), mirror neurons fire in such a way that the same part of our brain lights up as though we were doing that thing ourselves. If a baby watches you laugh, the part of her brain that makes her laugh lights up. If a baby watches you walk, the parts of his brain in charge of motor coordination light up. Interestingly, this response is much less strong when watching a video of another person's behavior, rather than in person, although it still happens. Still, the best learning happens in person.

The link to compassion is pretty clear. As one of the presenters on Friday explained, a three-year-old child, upon seeing someone hurt his or her finger, will often try to comfort that person. That toddler's mirror neurons are firing in her brain in such a way that she understands the pain of a hurt finger; the part of her brain that would be active if she'd hurt her own finger is active watching someone else. She has learned how her mother behaves when the toddler has hurt her finger, and so she comforts the adult in the way she has learned. This interplay of mirror neurons and learned behavior is the basis of compassion.

Young children therefore have a built-in capacity to empathize with the pain and joy of others. Yet, as the Dalai Lama and several of the scientists emphasized, this capacity has to be brought out through our caregivers. It takes a parent or guardian loving and raising that child to bring out the innate ability to be compassionate. The wrong guidance can bring out violence instead.

One of the panelists, Dr. Alicia Lieberman of UC San Francisco, drove home this point. She said, "Children can cope with very adverse circumstances when they have at least one relationship that gives them hope and makes them feel cherished." However, she emphasized, mirror neurons also mean that children can learn negative behavior and emotions as well. She told of a boy who had been kicked out of nursery school for throwing a chair and telling someone he was going to kill them. When Dr. Lieberman followed up at the boy's home, she found out he was mimicking precisely the behavior of his father, threatening to kill his mother a few days before.

Children can learn and mimic actions, behaviors, and feelings both positive and negative. The child acting up in nursery school was only expressing emotions by repeating his father's behavior. It's striking how well children can do this. In a lighter example, I recently saw a home movie of a child doing a parody of a cooking show segment; the child gets a lot of the long words and even vocal inflections dead-on. It's hilarious, but it's also a reminder of how seriously we have to take our behavior around children. If a child can do such a good job of imitating a video (and again, remember mirror neurons don't even respond as strongly to people on video), how closely are our children learning from our behavior in front of them?

This is a reminder that the love we express for our children and around them is essential to helping them develop into compassionate adults, while violent and angry behavior shapes our children as well. We need to be intentional about everything we do and say; our children are watching and learning.

I'll leave you with a few words from the Dalai Lama that I managed to jot down:

"From birth, we already have the capacity [for compassion]. Now, further nurture that. These precious things, we have from birth because of necessity." - Dalai Lama


*If you're interested in reading more of the latest research on mirror neurons, send me an email at dgardner (at) uwkc (dot) org and I'll send you some.

Thanks to sylvar for the Creative Commons photo.