Free The Age of Empathy by Frans de Waal Page A

and her two sons. One son, Freud, had hurt his foot so badly that he was barely able to walk. Mother Fifi usually waited for him, but sometimes moved off before he was ready to limp after her. Her younger son, Frodo, proved more sensitive:
    Three times when this happened Frodo stopped, looked from Freud to his mother and back, and began to whimper. He continued to cry until Fifi stopped once more. Then Frodo sat close to his bigbrother, grooming him and gazing at the injured foot, until Freud felt able to continue. Then the family moved on together.
    This is not unlike my own personal experience. My mother has six sons, who all tower head and shoulders over her. Nevertheless, she has always been the leader of the pack. When she became older and frailer, however—which happened only in her late eighties—we had trouble adjusting. We’d step out of a car, for example, briefly help our mother out, but then walk briskly toward the restaurant or whatever place we were visiting, talking and laughing. We’d be called back by our wives, who’d gesture at our mother. She couldn’t keep up and needed an arm to lean on. We had to adjust to this new reality.
    Some of these examples are more complex than mere coordination: They involve assuming the perspective of someone else. Or, as in Goodall’s and my family’s account, alerting another to the situation of a third. The one thread that runs through all of these examples, however, is coordination. All animals that live together face this task, and synchrony is key. It is the oldest form of adjustment to others. Synchrony, in turn, builds upon the ability to map one’s own body onto that of another, and make the other’s movements one’s own, which is exactly why someone else’s laugh or yawn makes us laugh or yawn. Yawn contagion thus offers a hint at how we relate to others. Remarkably, children with autism are immune to the yawns of others, thus highlighting the social disconnect that defines their condition.
    Body-mapping starts early in life. A human newborn will stick out its tongue in response to an adult doing so, and the same applies to monkeys and apes. In one research video, a tiny baby rhesus monkey intently stares at the face of an Italian researcher, Pier Francesco Ferrari, who slowly opens and closes his mouth several times. The longer the monkey watches the scientist, the more its own mouth begins to mimic his movements in a gesture that looks like the typical lip-smacking of its species. Lip-smacking signals friendly intentions and is as significant for monkeys as is the smile for humans.
    I must say that I find neonatal imitation deeply puzzling. How doesa baby—whether human or not—mimic an adult? Scientists may bring up neural resonance or mirror neurons, but this hardly solves the mystery of how the brain (especially one as naïve as that of a neonate) correctly maps the body parts of another person onto its own body. This is known as the
correspondence problem
: How does the baby know that its own tongue, which it can’t even see, is equivalent to the pink, fleshy, muscular organ that it sees slipping out from between an adult’s lips? In fact, the word
know
is misleading, because obviously all of this happens unconsciously.

    A baby rhesus monkey stares at an experimenter and mimics his repeated mouth-opening.
    Body-mapping between different species is even more puzzling. In one study, dolphins mimicked people next to their pool without any training on specific behavior. A man would wave his arms, and the dolphins would spontaneously wave their pectoral fins. Or a man would lift up a leg, and the dolphins would raise their tails above the water. Think about bodily correspondence here, or in the case of a good friend of mine, whose dog started dragging her leg within days after he had broken his own. In both cases it was the right leg. The dog’s limp lasted for weeks, but vanished miraculously once my friend’s cast had come off.
    As Plutarch said,