Homepage › Articles › Science › Mimetic Desire: Philosophy Turned Science

Mimetic Desire: Philosophy Turned Science

It is a simple fact of life that human beings want what they can't have. Whether you're pining after a boy or girl who is already taken or the Pop-tart your sibling is eating, it's blatantly apparent that humans like things other people have. Until recently, psychologists and neuroscientists (people who study the nervous systems, as in- the brain and nerves) have never quite been able to identify why our brains are programmed to want something we couldn't have. But in a study published in the May issue of the Journal of Neuroscience, scientists believe to have discovered the neurological cause of this behavior.

The "want what someone else has" phenomenon has been studied by psychologists as Mimetic Desire- a theory and phrase coined in the 1980's by a French philosopher, René Girard. He theorized mimetic desire as not wanting something for ourselves but wanting something because someone else wants it. For example, you may not want that Pop-tart because it's tasty- but you want it because your sibling also wants it and has it. French neuroscientists have verified that this phenomenon does indeed exist and have even attempted to explain how and why it happens.

This team of French neuroscientists, lead by Mathias Pessiglione, showed adults one of two videos. Both videos were of a piece of candy sitting on a surface- but in one of the videos there is a hand reaching for the candy. Participants then ranked the candies they saw by how much they wanted it. So, if the theory behind mimetic desire is correct, then the participants would have ranked the candies being reached for by other people higher then the others- and they did. Not only did they prove the phenomenon on a psychological level but they backed up their results with brain scans.

When the participants' brains were scanned when shown the videos- certain parts of the brain showed an increase of activity when showed the video of someone else reaching for the candy. One of the systems that showed an increase of activity were the mirror neurons (in various parts of the brain). These neurons fire when a person (or animal) acts or observes another preforming the same action. The other areas of the brain that increased in activity were the ventral striatum and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex - these two areas are involved in deciding how important something is or determining the worth of an object or person. Not only do these structures function seperately, but they are also connected. Pessiglione's team analyzed the scans to discover that the mirror neurons fire when seeing the other person reaching for the candy and then the neurons tell the other structures to rank that candy as having a greater importance then the other candy.

Based on the scans and the surveys taken by the participants, the Pessiglione and his team discovered yet another connection between the behavior and the physiology. The participants that wanted the candy being reached for more than other participants also showed higher levels of activity in the brain. The team found that this was because the stronger the desire- the stronger the connection between the mirror neurons and the other brain structures. The team also found that this could the other way: that the stronger the connections in your brain, the more desire you had. This then leads to further research that could be done with people with any kind of autism (who tend to value things differently then other human minds) to discover how the connections in their brains work. Pessiglione is already looking into studying how the results would differ if the hand reaching for the candy was not human- but instead a chimp or robot, to discover if mimetic desire applies only to human-human contact.