What is Charisma?

Many performers, politicians, religious leaders and business leaders have a quality that makes us pay attention to them. Barack Obama has it, Bill Clinton does too. Remember the line from Evita: “Just a bit of star quality.” When they orate, we feel charged. Adele has it – when one of her songs is playing, we listen, her mood becomes our mood. Katharine Hepburn famously said, “I don’t know what star quality is, but whatever it is, I’ve got it.” Yes she did, and we collectively spend billions of dollars a year to watch movies with stars who have it.

The bible is full of allusions to “Men of God” – prophets who usually persuade others to heed their advice. When a prophet had this quality, people seemed to recognize it immediately even when they weren’t ready to obey. The people of Ninevah surprised Jonah by embracing his message immediately. Jeremiah, on the other hand, was frustrated that his warnings were not heeded. Even among prophets, some had it, some didn’t.

Joan of Quebec had it, as did her spiritual progenitor, Joan of Arc.

Microexpressions

What is it that the person with charisma is putting out there, and what are we taking in? It may have something to do with microexpressions. Charles Darwin believed that humans, and possibly other animals, have evolved the ability to convey and respond to a universal set of emotions. It helped us to survive to be able to quickly detect whether a stranger is friend or foe. The sociologist Margaret Mead, believed that facial reflections of emotions differ depending on the culture. Paul Eckman traveled to the highlands of Papua New Guinea in 1967 and found a tribe that had no exposure to any cross-cultural contamination. What he learned was that they produced and recognized the same facial expressions that we produce and understand. He identifies seven facial expressions of emotions that are universally recognized - happiness, disgust, anger, fear, surprise, contempt and sadness. Darwin was right!

Eckman and others have demonstrated that both the production of the facial expression and its recognition are done in well under a second, possibly as quickly as 15 thousandths of a second. This is much too fast for us to be conscious of – it’s the kind of fast mental processing characteristic of instincts. Eckman called such expressions “microexpressions.” We all produce them instinctively as we feel emotions. We all read them instinctively from others as they feel emotions.

Not only are facial expression of emotions almost instantly produced and recognized, but we pick up and produce a host of other momentary cues about emotions. The tilt of the head, the holding of the shoulders, the reddening of the face, the way the hands and arms are used – the body language – provides cues of emotional state. So does the voice: Does it quiver or is it forceful? Is it louder or softer? Does it rise or fall in pitch? Do the words come out quickly or slowly? What is the intonation, the inflection, the stress, the phrasing, and the rhythm? Without thinking, we react to all these vocal cues from others very quickly. Nor do we have to think about them as we talk – they are instinctive.

Babies read these cues from their mothers and mothers from babies. Dogs seem to as well. In fact, one of the big differences between non-domesticated wolves and domesticated wolves (i.e., dogs) seems to be their ability to read human emotions and intentions, perhaps even better than humans can.

Homunculi

How do we read emotions so quickly and effectively? It turns out we all have a homunculus inside – actually, a few of them. A homunculus, Latin for “little human,” is a scale model of the human body. The Greek philosopher Epicurus believed that our soul is like a being within us that accounts for our sense-perceptions. Scientists now believe that there is a little human, a “sensory homunculus,” mapped into a specific section of our brain. When you receive a sensory stimulus from, say, giving someone a thumbs-up sign, the thumb area of the sensory homunculus lights up on an fMRI. The homunculus is upside down and is opposite to the side of the body that is receiving stimulation; your right thumb is on the left side of my brain. Here’s a depiction of where the brain-mapping areas are for sensory organs:

There’s a second homunculus. The second little person in your brain corresponds to your movable parts.  Whenever you want to move some part of your body, the corresponding area in your motor cortex lights up in an fMRI. The exact location and size will vary from person to person. Here’s a general idea of where that “little human,” the one who is responsible for initiating movement, resides in the brain:

Mirror Neurons

Not only do neurons in this area fire when you intend to act, they also fire when you watch others act. The two homunculi aren’t just little versions of you, they’re little versions of other people too. These are the places where we read others’ facial expressions, voice, and body language. There is a lot of overlap between the mirror you hold up to yourself and the mirror you hold up to others – so much so that when you watch someone else walking, your brain areas get charged up just as if you yourself are about to walk. You know how it feels for the other guy to be walking. We physicalize (to the extent that motor neurons are charged and ready to fire) and feel along with the other person.

There are mirror neurons in the sensory homunculus, in the motor homunculus, and in the  areas of the brain that quickly identify and produce emotions and their resulting microexpressions. The brain regions involved when you experience an emotion and when you see others experience that emotion are exactly the same. Not only do we know which emotion the other guy is feeling, we feel exactly how he feels when he shows anger, or smiles, or is surprised. When he smiles, you instinctively begin to smile. When he shows anger, your first impulse is to mirror his anger. This seems to be the neurological basis for empathy.

Empathy

Several researchers have found that the mirror neuron system is activated in empathy. People who consider themselves to be particularly empathic demonstrate particularly strong activation of the mirror neurons for emotions, sensations and body action intentions. We’ve all known that if we smile when we’re feeling sad, we’ll feel happier -- the motor neurons are a two-way circuit that feeds back to the cerebral cortex. However, empathic activation requires that you be able to display the same action as the other guy. If you botox the area between and above your eyes, you may soon lose the ability to instinctively comprehend that the other guy is surprised, and your own feelings of surprise may be dampened or slowed down as you move away from your natural instinctive control to something you have to consciously control.

It may be that some people have the ability to get their and our mirror neurons firing like crazy. We identify with them, feel exactly what they’re feeling. We may even want to do whatever it is they’re doing. When we’re tuned into them, we feel like them more than ourselves. The empathy is powerful, and it feels good too. Maybe the strong firing of the mirror neurons causes a surge in neurotransmitters like oxytocin and dopamine, the same way they surge when we look into the faces of our babies. I think this may explain how charisma works. This may be how a St. Joan is able to seduce a nation into going to war.

Charisma

It may be that some individuals can evoke a charismatic response in us in some modes but not in others. Stage actresses Mary Martin and Ethel Merman were known to entrance theater audiences but evoked a lesser response on camera. Perhaps their body language was charismatic in a way that their close-up facial expressions were not. Aretha Franklin makes us all want to sing joyously along with her, but by most accounts, is fairly boring to watch in concert. Tina Turner, on the other hand, electrifies from the moment she walks on stage. Some stars became stars because the camera loved them. Facial expressions, enlarged to silver-screen size, may evoke a response that a life-sized version never could. Studio moguls learned early on that they had to watch the actor in a screen test to assess their star quality. The camera loves Hollywood’s top paid actor, Tom Cruise, but with his slim build and below-average (5’7”) height, do you think he would grab your attention if he were walking on the other side Times Square? I suspect he might disappear into the crowd if you could not clearly see his facial expressions.

This leaves open the question of why some people have charisma and others don’t. It seems to be innate. Even little children can have it – think Shirley Temple or Honey Boo-Boo. You can’t stop watching them even if they offend your aesthetic principles. I think some people are born with the ability to micro-express face, body, and voice in such a way that it triggers our mirror neurons, and the homunculi in our heads produce a strong empathic response.

Is there a charismatic figure you instantly relate to? When you watch or listen to him/her, do you feel like you  can feel what he/she is feeling? Do you feel like you trust him/her implicitly? If he asked you to vote for him, did you?