On
my walk yesterday morning I found that at one stage my mirror neurons took over
as I approached a woman hurrying towards me with a camera and pointing it up in
the air. Then I saw another couple 25 yards away stopped and looking up as
well. My mirror neurons would not be silent and I stopped and looked up.
Now,
I knew we weren’t far from our osprey’s nest and the tree I was looking up at
probably had her mate in, but I had to join in and stand and stare. This of
course is a well-known effect and has just had another quantitative check by
Gallup et al who have published in
this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (1).
The
new experiments were done in the busy streets of Oxford at lunchtime and at a
commuter station. Over 3,000 pedestrians were tracked and the first type of
experiment just entailed some plants stopping and looking up at a roof-top
camera. The second type of experiment had a couple acting as though they were
trying to discretely video people while one of them was taking copious notes –
good conspiracy theory stuff.
The
results showed that lunch ideas were tending to damp down mirror neuron
activity. The bigger the group of planted starers, the more people tended to
spend time also looking and about a dozen seemed to saturate the interest of
the hungry crowd. However, the starers didn’t cause the crowd to crystalize so
that they all stopped to stare.
Being
English, the people in the crowd were more likely to look if the others who
were looking would be unable to see that they were also looking. And as for
staring at people doing suspicious things in a commuter station, that would be
really bad form. Nobody would want a “and
what are you looking at?” response which is a standard precursor to a Donny
Brook.
