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Health & Fitness

"Babies have a sad life"—So says my 4-year-old granddaughter Zoe.

Children say the darndest things. What neuroscience can teach us about empathy.

A couple of weeks ago, my son and two grandchildren were visiting our home.  It was a warm and sunny day, so my granddaughter Zoe and I were out on the front patio playing with play-doh.  Four-year-old Zoe was intensely involved in making a rainbow-colored flower, when her one-year-old brother Nathan came to see what she was doing.  He is a very new walker, so down he fell hitting his head on the doorjamb.  As my son came rushing to attend to Nathan, I said to Zoe, “Oh, your brother just fell down and bonked his head.”  Zoe quickly exclaimed, as she continued to concentrate on her project, “Grandpa, babies have a sad life.”  I said, “How about you? What is your life like?”  She smiled reassuringly and said, “I have a happy life.”  I was struck by her very natural insight, and it also made me wonder about Zoe’s ability to be empathic.

 I told this story to a friend of mine who is a child development specialist.  Susie told me that Zoe’s ability to differentiate her feeling from someone else’s actually reveals the beginnings of empathy.  She said that, on first glance, Zoe’s response could be perceived as callousness, but from a developmental point of view, perceiving that another child’s feelings are different than one’s own lays the foundation for understanding when people want to be comforted.

In my profession as a psychotherapist and college professor of psychology, I am continually learning and teaching the nuances of genuine empathy.  There have been some very interesting developments in neuropsychology, brain research and child development.  One area that interests me, in terms of understanding empathy, is the scientific research on the neurobiology of the brain and the notion of mirror neurons.  Mirror neurons were first discovered in 1992 by an Italian neuroscience researcher who was looking at an MRI of a Macaque monkey’s brain while the monkey was preparing to eat a nut.  Accidentally, the monkey began looking at a researcher who was also eating a nut, and the same area of the brain lit up.  A mirror neuron is a neuron that fires both when an animal or human acts and when the animal or human observes the same action performed by another. Thus, the neuron "mirrors" the behavior of the other, as though the observer were itself acting. What scientists now understand is that we are all soft-wired with mirror neurons so that if I am observing you experiencing anger, frustration, a sense of rejection, or joy, I can feel that same emotion. That’s because we are actually soft-wired to experience another’s plight as if we are experiencing it ourselves because the same neurons will light up in my brain as I observe your emotions.  Some scientists consider this to be one of the most important recent discoveries in neuroscience.

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 I once had a client who had a remarkable memory from his early childhood.  He remembered sitting at morning circle in preschool and all of the children were crying, including him.  The little girl next to him said, “Why are we crying?”  He responded, “Because our mothers have left us!”  This is an example of empathic distress, and scientists have suggested that we are actually soft-wired from childhood for sociability, attachment, affection and companionship, and that the first drive is the drive to actually belong. It is an empathic drive.

 So what is empathy and how does it relate to mirror neurons?  Simply put, we all have neurons that fire in our brains that don’t know the difference between ourselves and other people, like when we laugh when other people laugh and when we cry when other people cry.  So one definition of empathy would be the extent to which you mirror other people, or more simply put, the extent to what you feel what other people feel.

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 So how will little Nathan and Zoe’s mirror neurons develop so they will learn to be empathic?  There are many ways to teach empathy.  One answer comes with science, and the neurobiology of attachment, that says that my mirror neurons and Zoe’s will reflect each other, and my part of teaching empathy is to stay calm and mirror back her emotions.  This is especially helpful when she is upset because she will feel soothed, and learn to soothe herself.  Eventually she will be able to soothe others.  An example of this might be: “So Zoe, tell me more about your happy life.”

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