Neuroscience of Empathy - “I Feel Your Pain”

Mirror neurons again, this time like I expected a (soon to be) neuroscientist has this post on how mirror neurons has made us empathize with victims in Haiti.

"Empathy has become an area of contemporary psychological and neuroscientific research. In psychology, empathy refers to the ability to understand another person’s mental and emotional experience. While a great deal of psychology research created a conceptual understanding of empathy, it was in the early 1990s that researchers first gained insight into the biological mechanisms that may underpin empathy. Researchers at the University of Parma, Italy, discovered that when macaque monkeys observe another individual’s (monkey or human) actions, the neurons that normally fire when the monkey him/herself performs the same action also fires in response to watching another person. The finding of these neurons, known as ‘mirror neurons,’ suggests that these monkeys use the same neural mechanism to represent their own and others’ actions, creating a neurophysiological link between one’s own experience and that of another individual. Humans also seem to have mirror neurons in brain areas analogous to those observed in the macaques. Several studies confirm that when humans observe another person’s intentional action and/or emotional expressions, they activate brain areas that are also engaged when the person would perform the action or experience the emotion him/herself.

It is worth mentioning that the relative role of mirror neurons in human empathy is currently of heated debate among researchers in neuroscience and psychology. The mirror neuron theory suggests that because of the immediate overlap in neural activation in response to our own and other individual’s actions, we are able to imagine another individual’s subjective experience. Yet, much of the time we are either inaccurate about or apathetic towards another individual’s experience. Mirror neurons do not explain why humans empathize with others more or less easily, nor whether we are more or less accurate in imagining their internal mental experience."

Exactly, there is something big these scientists are missing. What I inferred after the Haiti quake was completely different from what these guys infer (last time I checked, we all do live on the same planet). I understand science needs patience and perseverance but there has been too much generalization given to role of mirror neurons when the ground reality doesn't correspond to it. There are lots of people who had "better things" to do than worry about Haiti. Mirror neurons doesn't explain or fit to these people. There is something amiss fundamentally and I saying all this as a big "fan" of mirror neurons.

But yet, I do understand the time factor. For example, the role of amygdala in emotions was made popular to the commoners by Daniel Goleman in his book Emotional Intelligence in 1995. But it took 15 years (last week, February 2010) for  the researchers to confirm the role of amygdala in a human bias - "Loss Aversion". Mirror neurons are much more complicated and empathy is more of a nurtured rather than an inherited trait. It will be while before we get out of this generalized routine and I am asking myself to be patient.