“Humans are hardwired to feel empathy, suggests a new imaging study showing that certain pain-processing regions of the brain light up when a loved-one is hurt.
But no one actually ‘feels’ the physical pain of the ones they love. The UK researchers suggest that empathy is the result of our brain running a virtual simulation that represents only part of the other person’s experience.
‘That’ s probably why empathy doesn’t feel like pain in your hand,’ says Tania Singer, a neuroscientist at the University College London, who led the study. ‘It feels like when you anticipate your own pain. Your heart races, your emotions are engaged. It’s like a smaller copy of the overall experience.'” —New Scientist I have previously written about so-called ‘mirror neurons’ discovered in othe primates and presumably active in humans as well, which activate brain regions mirroring the activity in another individual we are watching. This is more confirmation of what I suspect is a neurological basis for empathy. This New Scientist article states that humans are the only creatures capable of empathy, which has most likely been strongly selected for, given the adaptive advantages that would be provided by such a direct indication of the feelings or intentions of another with whom we are interacting. By extension, this is one of the foundations for social life. I doubt, both on the basis of the ‘mirror neuron’ evidence and the social organization of primate life, that we are the only species capable of empathy in this sense.
Meanwhile, I share the interest many behavioral scientists have in autism, which may provide crucial clues about the neurobiological fundaments of social life. The Boston Globe discusses the approach of Cambridge University psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen, whose work I have previously discussed here and who feels that ‘mind-reading capacity’ (which he distinguishes in a not entirely convincing way from ’empathy’ by using a nonintuitive, narrow definition of the latter) is hard-wired. He also feels it is an essential basis for social interaction and ascribes the social deficits of autistic patients to defects in their mind-reading capacity. This may be the foundation for the oft-mentioned impairment in autistics’ capacity for ‘theory of mind’, in short the ability to envision others around one having internal experiences and feelings similar to one’s own. Studies have shown that autistic subjects do not use the specialized person-perception circuitry humans have evolved but rather process their perceptions of people in different brain regions which are involved in the perception of objects. Baron-Cohen feels he can measure ‘mind-reading capacity’ with a test that taps into one’s ability to decipher someone’s internal state by reading subtle clues in their eyes. Baron-Cohen also has another test you can take to measure your AQ, or autistic quotient (abit simplistic but, presumably, the higher your AQ the lower your ‘mind-reading’ ability). I recently heard Fred Volkmar, an autism researcher at Yale, present his fascinating work in this area. Using Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? as a source of rich emotional interplay without much ‘action’, he shows with eye-tracking cameras that autistic subjects do not follow the flow of emotion in the characters’ interaction but focus on out-of-context cues. Interestingly, they in particular do not look at the eyes of the characters, often preferring to focus on their mouths.
