Mirroring Creature

Human is The Best Mirror of Other Human

In every human interaction, there will be the act and the reaction. Talking, smiling, holding hands, or cursing are only several examples of possible acts and reactions. Human is the best mirror of other human.

A crying baby will trigger another baby to cry. Whatever the reason behind the cry, any baby who hear it will start to cry as well. Same goes for happiness, smile and the world will smile with you. When you see someone smile at you, even it was a stranger, you will smile back. Smiles are as contagious as crying. But why do emotions become contagious?

The mirror neuron in our brain will place ourselves to be easily susceptible of others’ emotion. The expression of our emotions whether it is love, disgust, or fear to the other persons, even when we don’t say it, will be palpable to them and unconsciously will drive them to mirror it. And if they happen to mirror the feeling, they will adopt the feeling as well. This is probably how you learn to love someone you don’t have the feeling, at first.

I remember the heartbreaking scene in Harry Potter in which we finally learned that Snape was after all this time still love Lily Potter and that he had grown to care for the boy as well. We might think that in case of Snape, the mirroring neuron doesn’t serve its job. The feeling should have been mirrored to Lily yet what we had is the unrequited love of Severus Snape to Lily Potter. It’s not the mirror neuron in Lily Potter’s brain that is flaw, I think it is Snape’s fault in how he express his care and love to Lily. He had difficulty in expressing her feeling to Lily, he even called Lily a slur. If we send confusing messages about how we truly feel, others will have difficulty in understanding the feeling and thus the mirroring process will condemn to be failed.

Although we first observed this phenomenon in human, emotional susceptibility is not exclusive to us. Animals also have this quality. There was this experiment in primate in which there were some monkeys that were shown videos of other monkeys who played happily and other video showed scenes of monkeys being tranquilized. The watching monkeys reacted as if it happened to them. Those who have been shown video of monkeys being tranquilized got their temperature dropped and developed cold sweat.

After learning about this trait, there are many things that now become clear to me. In some of our relationship with others, we let them come close enough, so that they will observe us better and vice versa. Observing is the first step of mirroring. When we let people see our emotion, we let them to feel our emotion as well. We will develop mutual feeling without understanding why we feel it. But if an observer let them feel whatever feeling other throw, one will prone to be overwhelmed and might cause an emotional breakdown. A good observer is a person who can mimic and imitate others feeling, without being influenced by it. A good observer is someone who can control their emotion well enough while at the same time able to feel others’ emotion and separate those feeling from his or her actual feeling. It is a feeling without feeling.

Let’s go back to the Severus Snape and Lily Potter case. We knew that Snape could not express his true feeling well enough. His message was too complicated and conflicting that it could be easily be misinterpret and misunderstood. While Lily in the other end, was not a good observer either. She was probably too young to understand multi-layered complex messages that make her impossible to mirror. The result of these is failure in their relationship.

This mirroring that we do in our communication works best if the senders, the ones who stand in front of the mirror, could uncover their true emotion. If they stand close enough to the mirror with a blinder that prevent themselves to be seen, it would be impossible for those standing in the receiver end to mimic the expression. The imitation of expression would be unclear thus the feeling that being reflected would be inaccurate.

Emotional susceptibility is what makes human connection possible. It plays central role in foundation of every successful relationship. After all, one of the requirement of successful relationship lays in communication and only by understanding others’ emotion better that we will begin to have an effective communication. Once we have an effective communication, a budding relationship will start to blossom.

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