Mirror, mirror, in the brain

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever you see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love and dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful -
The eye of a little god, four-cornered...

So begins Sylvia Plath's 'Mirror', an iconic piece that symbolises our poetic obsession with our own reflections. There's certainly something compelling about the way they sit and, as Plath puts it, 'meditate on the opposite wall', the way they are blank until animated by a face. The way we never quite see ourselves as we are in them. Anyone who has read 'Alice Through The Looking Glass' as a child might have nurtured a secret belief that mirrors are the doorways to another world: when I was hardly tall enough to peer into my gran's mirrored bathroom cabinets, I used to angle the doors so that they showed multiple versions of the back of my head and I could believe the people in the glass weren't really me, but the small population of a different world that I could reach through and touch at any time.

Peter Redgrove and Paul Muldoon (amongst many others) have joined Plath in attributing sinister qualities to mirrors at times. Muldoon's 1983 version of an Irish poem by Michael Davitt has them murderous, saying of a father: 'it was the mirror took his breath away'. Later, the narrator admits:

I was afraid that it would sneak
down from the wall and swallow me up
in one gulp in the middle of the night.

Elsewhere in contemporary poetry, this obsession with mirroring finds expression in an interest in symmetries and doubling. That's certainly true of the work of John Burnside, illustrated best, perhaps by 'The Good Neighbour', the title poem of his 2005 collection, which imagines a strange, similar 'other' who the narrator has never met, going about his business quietly:

He watches what I watch, tastes what I taste:
on winter nights, the snow; in summer, sky.
He listens for the bird lines in the clouds
and, like that ghost companion in the old
explorers' tales, that phantom in the sleet,
fifth in a party of four, he's not quite there,
but not quite inexistent, nonetheless...

Eventually, this shadowy doppleganger sets his book down and checks the clock:

...cell by cell, a heartbeat at a time,
my one good neighbour sets himself aside,
and alters into someone I have known:
a passing stranger on the road to grief,
husband and father; rich man; poor man; thief.

No wonder we're obsessed with doubling: the discovery of mirror neurons in the brain (see Rizzolatti, 1992; 2004) has been one of the most eagerly seized-upon neurological findings of recent years. From initial studies with primates, Rizzolatti and colleagues were able to show that recognising and responding to the actions of others does not simply depend on visual interpretation and the activity of higher-order visual areas but on specific neurons that fire only when we see / imagine someone else performing an action. This generates as much neural activity as when we perform those actions ourselves. Though the bulk of the work on mirror neurons was done using monkeys, in humans, brain activity consistent with that of mirror neurons has been found in the premotor cortex, the supplementary motor area, the primary somatosensory cortex and the inferior parietal cortex.

The implications of mirror neurons are, of course, vast. As Rizzolatti puts it, there's a strong possibility that such research might "show that the intuition of Adam Smith – that individuals are endowed with an altruistic mechanism that makes them share the fortunes” of others – is strongly supported by neurophysiological data. When we observe others, we enact their actions inside ourselves and we share their emotions." Thus "it is very plausible that the mirror mechanism played a fundamental role in the evolution of altruism." Scientists like V.S. Ramachandran have suggested that mirror neurons might be crucial to the development of Theory of Mind (our capacity to attribute certain states and intentions to others: a kind of 'mind-reading') and thus important in imitative language development, for example.

Of course, mirror neurons are something of a dream come true for literary theorists too, particularly those seeking to provide a cognitive framework for the way we read literature (cognitive poetics). They imply the possibility that we are so imaginatively engaged with a piece of writing that, on a neurological level, we really do see ourselves doing the things described in the work. A.S. Byatt published a fascinating essay in the TLS in 2006 in which she argued that the pleasure John Donne's poetry offers us is "the pleasure of extreme activity in the brain":  he makes his readers feel "the particular excitement of mental activity itself", concerning himself with the various schemas we have constructed to map our mental activities.

She argues that, in poems like 'To His Mistress Going To Bed', Donne inadvertently and instinctively appeals to what we now call 'mirror neurons', particularly with the couplet:

License my roving hands, and let them go
Before, behind, between, above, below.

Byatt contends: "Donne's adverbs of a flow of movement...are an appeal to mirror neurones. And the mirror neurones that respond to "Before, behind, between, above, below" are not picture-making neurones, but locations on the body of both writer and reader. They are the more powerful because they are purely brief firings in the mind of its deep habit of imagining motion in the body, and linking these images to other emotions, to form concepts and map them with grammar." 

I'd say the phrase 'appeal to mirror neurons' is a little too strong. Poets do not deliberately 'appeal' to our cognitive capacities. They write poems. The effect of those poems may unconsciously depend on some aspects of neurological and cognitive function. All the same, it certainly suggests a compelling way of looking at a number of texts.

Does our cultural obsession with mirrors and mirror neurons come from a form of empathy or a kind of narcissism? Sometimes, there's no telling. The only way to conclude this discussion with a suitable level of ambiguity is to turn to one of Paul Muldoon's earliest (and, in my opinion, best) poems, 'Wind and Tree.' The poem begins by speculating

In the way that most of the wind

happens where there are trees,

Most of the world is centred

About ourselves.

In the wind, the trees are brought together until they seem to hold each other, until they are almost 'breaking each other' - this mixture of violence and tenderness seems intended to make us thing of human relationships. Muldoon concludes:

Often I think I should be like

The single tree, going nowhere,

Since my own arm could not and would not

Break the other. Yet by my broken bones

I tell new weather.

We're left none the wiser, but infinitely wiser at the same time, unsure if we're alone any more, grappling with someone else, or just wrestling with ourselves.