Misleadingly vague title for a very important finding.

Preliminary observations of stroke patients with problems relating emotionally to others suggest that in order to feel empathy, people must be able to imitate the actions of others. In other words, to understand what others are feeling, you must put yourself physically in their shoes.

Stroke can damage any area of the brain, but the patients in question all have lesions to one particular brain structure – the insula, which lies between the frontal and temporal lobes on both sides of the brain.

On tests of their ability to gauge the emotions being experienced by people from their facial expressions in photographs, these patients perform very poorly compared to healthy controls.

…(I)f the insula does turn out to be the key to their emotional deficit, it would fit very well with data … on the neural correlates of empathy.

Understanding the linkages between brain and social behavior is one of the frontiers of neuroscience with immense implications. A crucial concept only recently elucidated is that of “mirror neurons”, of which longtime FmH readers will know I have previously written. Here’s a link to Ramachandran’s discussion of the notion several years ago at The Edge.