Daniel Siegel’s definition of the mind includes three parts. There’s the part most people think of when they hear “mind,” the signals whirling around inside our brains. But there’s also the rest of the nervous system, the gut, the spine, the skin, and all the associated in-the-body sensations. The part that most often gets left out, though, is the interpersonal part. Siegel includes the connections and signals between people in his Interpersonal Neurobiology description of the mind. Jean Paul Sartre described hell as other people (and that may well be true), but a more pressing proclamation may be that we are other people.
How Mice Work Together
The mouse world is an example of how the mind isn’t just tasked with maintaining homeostasis, or balance, inside the body, but also between and among bodies. In a new study, scientists cranked up the AC and observed groups of mice. They discovered that mice either chose to join or leave the huddle on their own accord or were passively excluded or included by others.
Then, scientists chemically reduced activity in some of the mice’s dorsomedial prefrontal cortices. The mice that had fully functional dorsomedial prefrontal cortices compensated for the inhibited mice. The inhibited mice were more passive about joining the huddle, so the other mice became more active in huddling up to stay warm. Fascinatingly, the mice’s huddle temperature and time to huddle were the same before and after the prefrontal cortex inhibition. The mice were able to compensate and still reach group homeostasis to keep each other warm.
I know humans like to think of themselves as above other species, as separate and apart; however, if we started thinking of ourselves as interdependent, of our minds as interconnected with other minds, we might get further faster in healing some of the major ills we currently face. Treating mental health problems as an individual misses the point. It’s not us versus other people. We are other people.
What Monkeys Teach Us
In the 1990s, Italian scientists discovered mirror neurons in monkeys. These are motor neurons that fire when we watch others, as if we are performing the observed action. More recently, mirror neurons have also been discovered in humans. These mirror neuron networks are just one example of how our minds exist both inside our brains and bodies and in connection with others. Our neurons are reacting and responding to other bodies’ signals, whether we’re physically responding or not.
How to Address Mental Health
To address our current mental health crisis without addressing our crisis of community is short-sighted. We can’t just diagnose, medicate, or meditate our way back to mental health. Because our minds are interconnected, we must also heal the interconnections between and among minds.
Just like those chilly mice who compensate to maintain group homeostasis, we have to find ways to huddle up with each other. Sure, we’re not monkeys, and we’re not mice, but to think that we can survive without each other is to misunderstand how our minds work. We are other people, whether we like it or not.