Monday, January 07, 2008

Empathy, not a human-specific attribute

The newest issue (Jan-Feb, 2008) of ‘Scientific American Mind’ published an article regarding empathy and its recent experiments and discovery. What intrigues me is that results of studies demonstrated and suggested that humans may not be the only beings having empathy. Monkeys, apes, and rodents also show similar behaviours.
The mechanism triggering empathy lies in the mirror neurons in brains. The strong claim, proposed by psychologists, that top-down processes are the main functionality showing empathy. That means people have a tendency to put themselves in others’ ‘shoes’ so as to empathize the pain or difficulties other people are undergoing.

However, neurobiologists’ viewpoint of bottom-up processes provide another perspective.
After all, imagination cannot fully stimulate a person’s emotion. For instance, imaging how an aeroplane flies does not trigger any empathy. The interesting part is how human, or rather brains, distinguish and show various degrees of empathy according to the relationship with subjects who are suffering. The article talks about other mammalians such as rats, monkeys also have similar behaviours. Certainly we are not positively sure whether these animals are exhibiting the exact same mechanism as humans or there are other factors involved.

My opinion is: can empathy only be explained by mirror neurons that predominantly resides in frontal lobes? What about a person’s cognition and memories? Can we clearly draw a line between cerebral activities and abstract conceptions such as emotion and spirituality? What about nature vs. nurture issues? To me personally, there is a still a long way to go if we want to shed light on how empathy is produced and what factors or mechanisms ascribe to this emotional attribute.

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