Social psychology looks at the basic human need to fit in and calls this the normative social influence. When we grow up, our moral and ethical compass is almost entirely forged by our environment, so our actions are often a result of the validation we get from society. Recent neurological research has confirmed the existence of empathetic mirror neurons. When we experience an emotions or perform an action, specific neurons fire. But when we observe someone else performing this action or when we imagine it, many of the same neurons will fire again, as if we were performing the action ourselves. These empathy neurons connect us to other people allowing us to feel what others feel. And since these neurons respond to our imagination, we can experience emotional feedback from them as if it came from someone else. This system is what allows us to self reflect. The mirror neuron does not know the difference between it and others and is the reason why we are so dependent of social validation and why we want to fit in. We are in a constant duality with how we see ourselves and ho others see us. This can result in confusion with identity and self esteem. And brain scans show we experience these negative emotions before we are aware of them. But when we are self aware we can alter misplaced emotions because we control the thoughts that cause them. This is a neurochemical consequence of how memories become labile and retrieved and how they are restored through protein synthesis. Self-observing profoundly changes the way the brain works. It activates the self-regulating neo-cortical regions, which give us an incredible amount of control over our feelings. Every time we do this our rationality and emotional resilience are strengthened. When we are not self-aware, most of our actions are impulsive and the idea that we are randomly reacting and not making conscious choices is instinctively frustrating. The brain resolves this by creating explanations for our behavior and physically rewriting it into our memories through memory reconsolidation, making us believe we were in control of our actions. This is also called backward rationalization, and it can leave most of our negative emotions unresolved and ready to be triggered at any time. They become a constant fuel to our confusion as out brain will keep trying to justify why we behaved irrationally. All this complex and almost schizophrenic sub consciousness is the result of a vastly parallel distributed system in our brain. There is no specific center of consciousness, the appearance of a unity, in fact, each of these separate circuits being enabled and being expressed in one particular moment in time. Our experiences are constantly changing out neural connections, physically altering the parallel system that is our consciousness. Direct modifications to this can have surreal consequences that bring into question what and where consciousness really is.
“We are constantly mirroring people around us subconsciously looking for things that reflect our own states and personality to protect our emotional balance. This is why so often are moods are reflected by the people around us and why we can be so immensed in music, games or movies that resonate with us and we are socially mirroring the artists or characters. Our understanding of others is naturally linking our perception of people actions to memory imprints of our own past experiences. This process gives us an intuitive impression but also makes us unaware of how complex people are.”
taken from: Athenes:Theory of Everything
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