YOU KNOW the feeling. You see that tarantula crawling across the chest of James Bond in the Dr No film and your flesh crawls. Researchers have discovered that we are hard-wired to share sensations with others in this way, and not just when confronted by a spider.
Nor is all of this just in your head – your body actually starts reacting as if the tarantula was on you. Prof Christian Keysers of the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience in Amsterdam is using brain scans to understand just how deep this empathetic connection goes.
“We have all watched a movie like this; your hands start to sweat, your heart beats faster, your muscles tighten up,” he said.
You will automatically jump if someone touches you from behind. “There is a deep physiological sharing of the state of James Bond,” he added.
“We are trying to find the biological reasons why what appears to be telepathy is felt with other people, how we automatically feel what is going on in other people,” Prof Keysers said over the weekend at the Euroscience Open Forum meeting in Dublin, which drew to a close yesterday.
“When we look at other people we actually perceive their emotions, fear, anger, happiness,” he said. “You peek somehow magically into the life of the other person, seeing what is behind the scenes.”
He likens it to the simple wisdom of the “golden rule”: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. But in this case we in effect map others on to ourselves.
Visual recognition of a person’s emotions as played across their face comes readily but the involuntary physiological changes are a different matter.
These happen whether you want them to or not, he said.
“Why do you automatically go to the trouble of sharing the physiological state of someone else? This is where the neuroscience kicks in.”
He used functional magnetic resonance imaging to find out why this happens. These systems monitor blood flow, which increases if a brain region becomes active or drops back if it is not. “What we see is the movie starts to activate areas of the brain as if the spider was on their skin, areas as if they were crushing the spider and areas of emotion,” he explained.
“Your brain literally puts you in the skin of the other person.”
And the brain scans show that the activity mostly happens in lower-level areas of the brain, not in the higher conscious and logical regions.
“This is not only true for humans,” he said and can happen in monkeys and rats. For example, a rat will react with immediate fear if it sees another reacting that way, even before it knows whether there is a threat ahead.
“The contagion of the fear is incredibly useful. It gives you a way to strong collaboration and all the advantages it gives you in a group.”
The amount of empathy you feel is also related to whether the person is of your group or an outside group.
You would probably experience greater empathy to a neighbour than to someone living in another country.
