The Science behind Empathy
What makes us feel drawn to other people? It’s our sense of emotional connection, the feeling of being attached. Empathy plays an important role, it keeps us united, you and me, us and the other people. For a better part of time, we believed that empathy is something one is born with, and which is quite fixed in it’s nature. That maybe, like the levels of our consciousness, this concept exists unseen yet highly influential.
With further research in the field, we now know that empathy, like happiness, excitement, sadness, is a ‘feeling’. It stems from activation of certain parts of our brain, firing of some neurons when influenced by a stimuli (situation).
Have you ever noticed what happens when someone yawns in front of you? Most often, you’ll yawn too. This happens because seeing someone carry out an activity activates the similar part of brain areas as in the one who actually carries out the activity. Makes sense right? These are called the ‘mirror neurons’.
Role of ‘Mirror Neurons’ in Empathy?
A mirror neuron is a neuron that activates both when an animal acts and when the animal watches another animal performing the same activity. As a result, the neuron “mirrors” the behavior of the other, as though the observer were behaving. Such neurons have been seen directly in humans, primates, and birds. In humans though, these mirror neurons can be seen active in case of emotions too. Let’s take an example, you and your friend are hanging out, and s/he is sad or tense about something, your brain recognizes the emotions, through verbal and non verbal cues. The mirror neurons get activated, certain brain areas experience the arousal, the same as your friend. Now, this is not only limited to feelings, this acts upon your whole body, in terms of body temperature, your heartrate, blood pressure etc. Thus, the saying, ‘you feel with your whole body’.
This is how we feel connected to each other, and why we feel happy for others, why we feel like helping others, this is ’empathy’. Since there is no ‘one way’, everybody can have these levels of mirror neuron activation. This is why, there are people who are higher on the empathy scale and why we have ‘psychopaths’. However, the theory might appear simplistic, there is always more to be found out. Empathy can be said to be a rare skill because when we talk about empathy, it requires taking on a loads of information and cues from the environment, interpreting it in a way that makes sense, which requires a certain degree of intelligence. It requires understanding and patience, but this skill can be developed.
Working with these skills
One of the strongest methods to improve your empathy abilities is to become more aware of your own emotions, whether happy or sad, and then, the emotions of others. Empathy is a severely under developed quality in many people since they have been accustomed to avoiding emotions. This is sometimes accomplished by making everything into a comedy, other times by overanalyzing, other times by over talking, other times by numbing habits, and yet other times by actually running away from the emotional circumstance (fight or flight response). If we stop seeing emotions as something we fear, and rather an incredible part of who we are as human beings, we naturally begin to learn more about our emotions and those of others, which is important for a skill like empathy to be developed.
