Brain Hard-Wired for Empathy: Study

[Mtnjim]

Brain

Hard-Wired for Empathy: Study

By Merritt McKinney

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Ever watched someone grimace

after they sniffed a carton of sour milk? Even though you were spared a whiff of stinky milk, to your brain, you

might as well have been sniffing the milk yourself, a report from Italy suggests.
New research shows that when we

see an expression of disgust on someone else\'s face, the same part of our brain -- the insula -- is activated as

when we feel disgust ourselves.
\"People have overemphasized the importance of thoughts in our understanding of

others,\" Dr. Christian Keysers of the University of Parma, a co-author of the report, told Reuters Health.


Although Keysers said that empathy for others is often thought of as a matter of morals, \"in our study, on the

other hand, we show that empathy is a very basic, simple and automatic process,\" he said.
Keysers explained that

when we see the emotions on another\'s face, \"we don\'t need to think about how that person feels.\" Instead,

according to Keysers, we share the feeling of disgust because the insula is activated as if we were disgusted

ourselves.
\"This sharing is automatic,\" he said. \"Our subjects were not asked to share the emotion of the

other person and did not report attempting to do so after the scan. It just happens.\"
Keysers continued, \"This

shared feeling of disgust could then be our key to understanding how the other person feels.\"
Researchers used a

tool called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to monitor the brain activity of 14 men as they watched

short movies of people smelling pleasant, disgusting and neutral odors. Brain activity was also monitored while

participants themselves smelled a variety of odors.
The researchers found that a part of the brain called the

anterior insula, which previously has been linked to feelings of disgust, was activated not only when participants

smelled something disgusting but also when they watched others take a whiff of something stinky.
A report on the

findings is published in the October 30th issue of the journal Neuron.
\"We implicitly understand the meaning of

the actions of others and the meaning of their emotions by simply stimulating them,\" Dr. Giacomo Rizzolatti,

another of the study\'s authors, told Reuters Health.
\"What we provide is a neurophysiological

characterization of empathy,\" said Rizzolatti.
The next step, according to Rizzolatti, will involve studies of

schizophrenia and autism to see to what extent malfunctioning in the ability to mirror the emotions of others is to

blame for difficulties in establishing meaningful relationships with other people.
SOURCE: Neuron, October 30,

2003.

[CptKipling]

I saw something like this on a TV program about the brain (BBC 1). It said that when we observe a person doing

something, the same pathways in the brain that are firing in the person they are watching to create that activity

are firing in the observer, but not actually causes an action.

The example they gave was rowers, saying that the

people watching the boat races actually had the pathways to create a rowing \"stroke\" firing in their

brains.

Cool huh?