Self-Images

There is the wisdom of discriminating awareness, which is seeing details on an ultimately precise level. Chögyam Trungpa

I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the window of a grocery store today and I was surprised, as I often am, by how old I appeared to be, much older than the self I encounter when shaving in the morning. I guess I don’t really see the entirety of my face when I shave, only a field of skin to be cleared of stubble.

We carry in our brains ideas of what we look like that are not necessarily up to date. I’ve had wonderful conversations with friends about our internal physical self-images and what ages those self-images are. Most of us tend to carry pictures of ourselves much younger than we are. My sense is that these images become established when we reach the age when most individuals of our species (until very recently in human evolution) attained their ultimate viability, somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-five.

By viability I mean the ability to survive. For all but the last few thousand years of three million years of human evolution only a very few individuals lived beyond thirty-five, and our genetics evolved accordingly. This is my theory as to why many of us retain images of who we were at thirty-five or twenty-eight or twenty-three, and not fifty-six or seventy-seven.

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There is another self-image I’m even more interested in than what we think we look like, and that is: who we think we are?

When I was in my early twenties, and again in my early fifties, I worked at preschools for children ages two to five-years-old. And what fascinated me most while doing that work was how fully developed children’s personalities were by the age of three.

By personality I mean one’s confidence or lack of confidence, one’s curiosity or lack of curiosity, one’s confusion or lack of confusion, one’s kindness or lack of kindness, one’s shyness or boldness, one’s sense of humor or lack of sense of humor – the myriad aspects of who we are. Which is to say, our personalities form in early childhood and determine who we think we are.

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In the thirty-five years since the discovery of mirror neurons, virtually everything psychologists and neurologists used to think they knew about the developmental phases of humans from infancy to adulthood, and virtually everything they thought they knew about how we learn and how our personalities develop, has been discarded or radically modified.

Babies, it turns out, don’t begin to imitate the behavior of their caretakers after some months, but within a few minutes of being born. Babies are quite literally psychic sponges, and most of their sponging is accomplished through mirror neurons.

What are mirror neurons? They are specialized brain cells activated when we perform an action and when we watch others perform actions. Mirror neurons link seeing and doing, and this allows our brains to simulate other people’s behaviors. Furthermore, mirror neurons empower us to feel what others are feeling by internally mirroring emotions and even physical pain. Mirror neurons are the engines of imitation, and we do most of our learning through imitating. Mirror neurons also help us intuit and understand the motives behind other people’s actions! In short, mirror neurons facilitate being who we are.

fin

Hey Baby from Todd’s album Dream of You