Empathy Mirror Neurons and the Theory of Embodied Simulation
Presenter:
Brain Facts
Time:
4:51
Summary
Humans are innately social creatures, and the human brain evolved to employ empathy for survival benefits and to navigate society. This human capacity for empathy is largely attributed to the theory of embodied simulation, which proposes that witnessing another individual's behavior or emotion triggers an empathetic response in our brain, which reacts as if we were experiencing it ourselves. This is enabled by specialized mirror neurons, which similarly fire both when we drop a brick on our toe and when we see someone else drop a brick on their own toe.
Transcript
Hello and welcome to today's video. Today we're going to take a deep dive into empathy. We will discuss what empathy is, why we have it, and the neural underpinnings that enable us to experience it ready. Let's begin. The term empathy refers to our ability to understand the thoughts and feelings of another. We can sense changes in someone's behavior, using social cues such as body language to put together their emotional state before that individual has to explain to us how they're feeling.
Now that we've established what empathy is, let's discuss why humans even experience empathy in the first place. Humans are innately social creatures, and our large brain has evolved to manage the complexities that come with being social.