Between Science and Fiction: Mirror Neurons and Hyper-Empathy

My posts on the grotesque and empathy are based on research I did for my Jan Van Eyck application to work as part of the Cross-Cultural and Counter-Modern Research Group led by Kobena Mercer. This post looks at empathy through science fiction and neuroscience.


Octavia Butler, 1947-2006


Octavia Butler on Writing and Hyper-Empathy

My rule for writing the novel was that I couldn't write about anything that couldn't actually happen. So my character couldn't have any special powers. Oddly enough because my character has a kind of delusion of empathy that is brought on by her mother's drug use--she has a particular syndrome that is supposed to be the result of her mother's drug use--some people have thought that this was a power, an extra-sensory power that she had. What my character has is--she calls it "hyper-empathy syndrome"--the inability to observe someone in pain without feeling pain. So she really does feel your pain.

And I remember talking to some people who thought this would be the perfect affliction to make us a better people because it's a kind of biological conscience, and you wouldn't be able to hurt people without feeling it. And I immediately began to think about ways in which that wouldn't be true and ways in which that would be disastrous.

Ways in which it wouldn't be true, for example: If you had money, you could pay some other people to take the pain, you know. Go out and hurt this person and OK, it's going to hurt you, but what the heck; you're going to be a lot richer when it's over. Or little boys discovering that they can be macho by being able to take more pain as they give it than other little boys. It would happen.

And the worst is who would want to be a health-care professional if hyper-empathy syndrome were real. Imagine being a dentist. (Laughter). Anyway, I give my character this affliction, not power but affliction, and force her to respond then to the misery that she sees around her. And one of the responses that she comes up with is this religion of hers.

MIT Lecture - Devil Girl From Mars: Why I Write Science Fiction
http://web.mit.edu/m-i-t/articles/butler_talk_index.html

2005 Interview with Octavia Butler on Democracy Now
http://www.democracynow.org/2005/11/11/science_fiction_writer_octavia_butler_on


Mirror Neurons and Empathy
http://www.interdisciplines.org/mirror



Excerpted from Interdisciplines Website, Eurpean Science Foundation:

The discovery of mirror neurons in the frontal lobes of macaques and their implications for human brain evolution is one of the most important findings of neuroscience in the last decade. Mirror neurons are active when the monkeys perform certain tasks, but they also fire when the monkeys watch someone else perform the same specific task. There is evidence that a similar observation/action matching system exists in humans. The mirror system is sometimes considered to represent a primitive version, or possibly a precursor in phylogeny, of a simulation heuristic that might underlie mindreading.

Excerpts from "Intentional Attunement: The Mirror Neuron System and its Role in Interpersonal Relations," by Vittorio Gallese

On Mirroring emotions and sensations:

Emotions constitute one of the earliest ways available to the individual to acquire knowledge about its situation, thus enabling to reorganize this knowledge on the basis of the outcome of the relations entertained with others. The coordinated activity of sensory-motor and affective neural systems results in the simplification and automatization of the behavioral responses that living organisms are supposed to produce in order to survive. The integrity of the sensory-motor system indeed appears to be critical for the recognition of emotions displayed by others (see Adolphs 2003; Adolphs et al. 2000), because the sensory-motor system appears to support the reconstruction of what it would feel like to be in a particular emotion, by means of simulation of the related body state.