Understanding Empathy—Intuitive and Rational Systems Work Together: Study

How do we relate to people who are physically very different from ourselves? According to new research from California, we do it automatically via a combination of intuitive and rational brain processes.

Lisa Aziz-Zadeh and colleagues at the University of Southern California investigated the neural pathways of a woman born without limbs when she registered the actions and pain responses of other people with limbs.

The team predicted that if the goal of an action was possible in the observer, her own motor regions would be involved in processing the visual information based on the mirror neuron system in which mirror neurons fire during both the execution and the observation of a specific action.

The researchers used functional magnetic imaging (fMRI) to compare the brain activity of the congenital amputee with 13 normally developed women while the participants watched various videos.

One set of videos showed tasks that were performed with the hands, feet and mouth, such as a mouth eating and a hand grasping an object.

Although the congenital amputee did not have arms or legs, she could perform some tasks in the videos, for example she could hold objects between a stump and her chin.

As predicted, the scientists observed that sensory-motor areas of her brain were particularly active when viewing tasks she could still perform despite lacking those body parts.

However, deductive reasoning areas of the brain were also engaged when she was shown tasks she could not perform.

These areas are not normally active in people watching a task they can perform, and are thought to be associated with a process called “mentalizing” when one person tries to understand the mental state of another based on their behavior.

“What’s interesting is that even when she can’t do it, when it’s impossible for her, she still recruits her mirror system, but she additionally recruits these mentalizing regions,” Aziz-Zadeh told Science News.

Empathy arises mostly in the intuitive, sensory-motor areas of the brain when a person can relate directly to another, but more in the rationalizing regions of the brain when they cannot.

The two systems produce empathy together, functioning to different degrees according to each particular situation, Aziz-Zadeh explained in a press release. “People do it automatically,” she said.

“These results provide a novel understanding for how we understand and empathize with individuals who drastically differ from the self,” the authors concluded in the studys abstract.

The study was published in the journal Cerebral Cortex on July 6.