Humans have a remarkable capacity for empathy. One of the TV science magazines covered the subject and demonstrated the existence of the “human empathic circuit” in the brain. I can’t recall the program, however the science of the subject is covered in a paper in TheScientificWorldJOURNAL (2006) by Jean Decety and Claus Lamm from the University of Chicago. The article is available from Decety on the UofC website.
Empathy has many definitions, most of describe the symptoms rather than the mechanism of the emotion. When measuring the brain activities of humans watching, listening or recalling certain events; scientists have shown that subjects display the same brain patterns as when they perform or experience the event. In short the empathic circuit allows humans to experience something without doing it, in many cases, quite effectively. Of course, these experiences are temporary and limited to the attention the subject pays to the subject, otherwise after seeing someone break a leg you wouldn’t be able to walk – instead we wince at pain and then the feeling subsides.
Particular types of stimulation are very effective at invoking the empathy. Hollywood knows this all too well. Movies played in a theatre at high volume and in the dark, focus and overwhelm multiple senses with imagery and sound. This creates a remarkably effective experience that sometimes last for days. Sometimes traumatic events in the physical world are marked by a song or sight which triggers the emotion again. The famous line “I was doing (blank) when I heard President Kennedy was shot” is an example of this.
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