So, I’ve been thinking about bullies and narcissists a lot, as they’ve been a recurring theme the past few years in various contexts.

Lara raises an interesting conundrum in her recent blog post about social/relational aggression, which is behaviors—rumor spreading, exclusion—we typically attribute to teenaged girls. A school principal recently told Lara that she was seeing a sharp and surprising increase in social/relational aggression from boys.

So, Lara speculates, is it possible that zero-tolerance anti-bullying programs are not eliminating bullying but just pushing it underground, into the guerrilla bullying we usually associate with girls?

And I wonder: Is it possible that aggression—physical or relational--can’t be stopped because it contributes to our emotional and/or moral development? Does it teach us lessons about survival? After all, the world is full of people who suck. We need to know how to recognize aggression and protect ourselves from it.

That’s what people who are bullied learn—if they survive the bullying. I know not all do, or they are wounded. Here we are yet again, at my favorite words for living: That which does not kill us makes us stronger. Because the first time you stand up to a bully and watch him or her shrink back, or the first time you realize you can deflect emotional blows with attitude alone, is a powerful moment.

But what of the bullies? If bullying itself is a developmental stage, what is it good for?

Some young bullies learn empathy, I’m sure. Based on nothing but what I would like to believe, I think some young bullies have epiphanies, a moment when they see something in the eyes of a target, or hear their words echoed back to them in a new way, or face a bully themselves and experience a compassionate awakening, when their hearts grow three sizes.

But some young bullies just grow up to be old bullies. These people, I think, are the narcissists. I don’t think all narcissists are bullies but I speculate that all bullies are narcissists because one of the hallmarks of narcissism is lack of empathy and one must be lacking in empathy to be intentionally cruel to another human being.

So thinking about all this got me thinking—can empathy be learned? Is an adult who lacks empathy capable of developing it? Is empathy a behavior, a thought or a feeling? (What is a feeling, anyway? Entire books have been written about that.)

Meandering through these thoughts, I stumbled on this little article about mirror neurons.

Mirror neurons are a type of brain cell that respond equally when we perform an action and when we witness someone else perform the same action.

In other words, when we see someone else do some things, our brains light up as if we were doing that thing ourselves.

The main reason I have trouble watching violent movies is because I have sympathetic pain. If I see hurt, I hurt. Physically. I can’t even listen to people describe dental procedures. And as a child, I was big on sympathetic throwing up. If someone else hurled, I’d hurl in solidarity. Not all the time but it happened. Could that be overactive mirror neurons?

Research on mirror neurons started with monkeys and peanuts (doesn’t everything?) and is now to the point where researchers are looking at whether the neurons are triggered according to the intent of the action witnessed. For example, in one study, participants watched videos of a hand picking up a teacup.

In one video, the teacup sat on a table amid a pot of tea and plate of cookies--a signal that a tea party was under way and the hand was grasping the cup to take a sip. In the other video, the table was messy and scattered with crumbs--a sign that the party was over and the hand was clearing the table. In a third video the cup was alone, removed from any context. The researchers found that mirror neurons in the premotor cortex and other brain areas reacted more strongly to the actions embedded in the tea-party context than to the contextless scene.

Taking this research about a thousand stages from this, we could extrapolate that emotional empathy is also connected to mirror neurons—that thinking about the sadness or pain of someone else would fire up the mirror neurons so we feel the same in us. We would “feel their pain.”

Can this be learned? Now that brain science tells us that the brain is not a locked black box but can grow and change, I suppose this means it can, theoretically. I can’t think how, though. Nor would it would be easy—even if you could find an unempathetic person who believed it something worth learning. If you don’t care, you don’t care, right?

Labels: brain science, bullies, narcissists, neurology, personal growth, psychology