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DiggThe Neuroscience of Empathy
Empathy is more than a matter of the heart — it’s a matter of the mind, too.
In 1996, scientists in Italy discovered an intriguing group of nerve cells that may offer clues to the inner workings of empathy. These particular cells, called mirror neurons, fired when a monkey reached for a snack or when the same monkey watched someone else reach for a snack. There was no distinction, on the cellular level, between an experience the monkey was having and an experience the monkey perceived someone else was having.
“When you see someone reaching out to grab something,” Dr. Christina Sekaer, a New York psychiatrist, explains, “something in your brain fires. It makes you feel what the other person is doing.”
“Empathy,” she says, “is something that resonates in your brain, and therefore, in your thinking and your emotions, as a result of how you perceive what’s happening to someone else or what someone else is experiencing.”
Although the mirror neuron experiments were done with monkeys, similar cells have been found in human brains, as well. And mirror neurons may go a long way toward explaining how we connect and empathize with others.
Dr. Sekaer points to the infant fascination with faces. Babies, she says, are engineered to be attracted to faces and, so, become “face experts.” Becoming such an expert in interpreting facial expressions helps develop social skills and, possibly, mirror neurons. Studies with autistic children have shown that they don’t have the same ability to read faces — and that the mirror neurons in that area of their brains do not fire when looking at a face. The implications of such a discovery may turn out to be very important.
“If you found a way to bring [the neurons] out and develop them, then it would make sense that you could repair a lack of empathy,” Dr. Sekaer says.
--Nicole Seiferth
Comments
I've read of additional observations of infants that suggest, in addition to the visual, other sensory pathways may also play a role in the activation of "mirror neurons". Newborns will frequently respond to the crying of another infant by starting to cry themselves -- even when they are not in sight of each other. This not only indicates the capacity to experience empathy at a profound level of awareness, it also demonstrates the ability to express, spontaneously and authentically, the feelings that experience engenders. What could better support the notion that empathy is indeed an inborn, hard-wired human trait? That it is truly an organic birthright?
jasper sneed on July 29, 2008
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