I
feel your pain
Page 2
 ...were
seated next to MRI scanners that were able to measure the brain
activity by looking at the blood flow to certain regions of the
brain. As certain regions of the brain are activated, blood flow
increases and they light up on the scanner. By comparing the MRI
images of a woman when she was being shocked to when her husband
was being shocked, the scientists were able to see what areas of
the brain were triggered by the physical sensation of pain versus
the knowledge that a loved one was feeling that pain.
Singer and her colleagues found that the women responded to their
partner’s pain by echoing some of the same brain activity
that would occur when they themselves were in pain, but not all
of it. They only felt some of their partner’s pain. The women’s
brains failed to register the partner’s pain as a physical
sensation of pain, but rather evoked the emotional suffering of
what that pain would feel like.
What actually occurs when the brain feels empathy is a complex behavior
that relies on several systems, says Marco Iacoboni, a neuroscientist
at the University of California, Los Angeles. One of the key participants
is an almond-shaped region of the forebrain known as the amygdala,
which showed increased blood flow. This makes sense, since the amygdala
is part of the limbic system or “emotional brain.” The
region has strong connections to people’s emotions, especially
fear and nervous reactions, and scientists suspect it mediates both
inborn and acquired emotional responses as well. Now scientists
are finding the frontal lobe is also activated during the studies,
making it a key component of empathy.
“Although empathy is experienced as a feeling, it has a cognitive
as well as affective component,” according to William Damon,
a developmental psychologist at Stanford University. The frontal
lobe is part of the cerebrum, the more cognitive part of the brain.
It receives information from the senses and the emotions and integrates
that data into a plan of action for the individual, as well as choosing
whether or not to follow through with the plan. So empathy employs
not only the feeling part of the brain, but thinking parts as well.
As a fundamental building block of our social interactions, empathy
plays a vital role in how we interact with each other. “Empathy
puts the brakes on violence. Empathy allows communication. Empathy
allows one to understand another’s behavior. Empathy allows
altruism,” says Simon Baron-Cohen, a research fellow at the
University of Cambridge. “Do you need any more... |
