Before I delve into the unknown—and perhaps unknowable—aspects of psychic experience, there are a few more pieces of the known world worth discussing. Specifically, if we ask how people unconsciously read others, and why some seem to be so gifted at it, the first place this lands us is squarely in the brain.
There’s a term that some of the people I’ve interviewed have used: empath. This might point directly to how we can best explain the interpersonal type of ordinary intuition. Because if empathy is the capacity to share in others’ feelings, an empath can be defined as someone with the ability and maybe the tendency to not only share in but actually take on those feelings as their own. Considering this, I find myself analyzing my own experiences, such as with the hostess whose vibe I felt so strongly. While I could see that she was expressing various emotions through her body language, I couldn’t pick out her tells well enough to say exactly what they were. It wasn’t that I observed her feelings so much as that I genuinely felt them with her.
What I felt, precisely, were several emotions that could be markers of being caught on the receiving end of intimate violence: humiliation, devastation, defiance, and something like effort—the effort of holding it all in. In other words, I wasn’t consciously aware of the visual, verbal, or tonal cues she projected, just the emotions that arose within me when I received those cues. It was like I was taking on her emotions, momentarily, as my own—to the degree that it felt like there was an intruder in my space, an invader in my body, simply too much of someone else inside my head. So I can see how this phenomenon, combined with experience over time, could yield a lot of expertise about how people feel in different situations.
In terms of how a brain might achieve this, research points to the neural basis of empathy, an integral tool for navigating social relationships: It appears to arise from the activity of the cortex’s mirror neuron system. This is a network of neurons that have been shown to fire when a person engages in an action, and also, in exactly the same way, when a person sees someone else engage in an action. This is the mirroring. And it is, at its simplest, how we learn to do something by first watching someone else do it. But beyond that, it also enables us to feel our way into other minds. When we mirror others’ expressions, simulating them with our own faces, we experience emotional contagion as our facial movements feed that information to the brain for processing. And this in turn helps us understand the intentions and motivations that drive others’ behavior—so much so that Botox, which paralyzes facial muscles, actually undermines our capacity to do so.
In some people, this ability reaches extremes. For them, the simulation can be too real. I remember an old episode of NPR’s Invisibilia podcast that featured a woman who could feel other people’s feelings so potently that she couldn’t distinguish them from her own. It turned out that she lived with a genetic trait called mirror-touch synesthesia, or MTS, in which overactive mirror neurons cause a person to feel what they see others feel as if the feelings are their own. And this includes not only emotions but also physical sensations. As in, when a person with MTS sees another’s leg get touched, they feel as if some ghost hand has also touched their own leg.
Unsurprisingly, the woman found it difficult to distinguish her own emotions from those of others. By the time she was interviewed for the podcast, she lived a circumscribed life. She was a mother but had divorced her partner, and she stayed at home a lot so as to not be swept away by the feelings of those around her, as had happened so often when she was young.
What’s perhaps more surprising is that, while she is an extreme case, this kind of synesthesia is not exceedingly rare. It is reported to be present in roughly one to two percent of the population—a statistic that some researchers have identified as the proportion of individuals with the heightened empathy that defines empaths. It makes me wonder, are my own mirror neurons overactive as well, just to a lesser degree? It seems that what enables some people to see so fully into others could very well be a combination of hyperactive mirror neurons and intuition-as-pattern-recognition. Does this explain how exactly I not only know things about other people, but know them in my body? And how much might that explain about the experiences of the people I’ve interviewed—or not?