Levonian
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From the February 19 issue of sciencenow, an online publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
When you see someone getting hurt, you flinch. And so does your brain. Indeed, when we empathize with another person's pain, we use many of the same brain areas that are activated by our own experience of pain, a brain-imaging study in the 20 February issue of Science has shown. The study is part of a growing body of research exploring how people try to grasp what another individual is experiencing by replicating the experience in their own brains.
Researcher Tania Singer of the Institute of Neurology at University College London, U.K., and her team set up an experiment using 16 couples who were romantically involved and presumed to be acutely sensitive to each other's pain. The woman lay in a magnetic resonance imaging machine while a 1-second electric shock was delivered to the back of either her hand or her partner's hand. She could not see his face but could see from an indicator which one of them was going to be zapped and whether the shock would be weak or stinging. When the woman received sharp shocks, regions known to respond to physical and emotional pain were activated, including the anterior cingulate cortex, the insula, and the thalamus. Many of the same regions were activated in subjects when their partners got the painful shock. But empathy alone failed to activate the somatosensory cortex, which relays fairly direct information about the physical nature and location of the pain.
Neuropsychiatrist Helen Mayberg of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, calls the study "brilliant." Using a "very fundamental system like pain," she says, the researchers have captured both sensory and emotional aspects of the experience and provided new insights on how they interact.
I Feel Your Pain, Really
When you see someone getting hurt, you flinch. And so does your brain. Indeed, when we empathize with another person's pain, we use many of the same brain areas that are activated by our own experience of pain, a brain-imaging study in the 20 February issue of Science has shown. The study is part of a growing body of research exploring how people try to grasp what another individual is experiencing by replicating the experience in their own brains.
Researcher Tania Singer of the Institute of Neurology at University College London, U.K., and her team set up an experiment using 16 couples who were romantically involved and presumed to be acutely sensitive to each other's pain. The woman lay in a magnetic resonance imaging machine while a 1-second electric shock was delivered to the back of either her hand or her partner's hand. She could not see his face but could see from an indicator which one of them was going to be zapped and whether the shock would be weak or stinging. When the woman received sharp shocks, regions known to respond to physical and emotional pain were activated, including the anterior cingulate cortex, the insula, and the thalamus. Many of the same regions were activated in subjects when their partners got the painful shock. But empathy alone failed to activate the somatosensory cortex, which relays fairly direct information about the physical nature and location of the pain.
Neuropsychiatrist Helen Mayberg of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, calls the study "brilliant." Using a "very fundamental system like pain," she says, the researchers have captured both sensory and emotional aspects of the experience and provided new insights on how they interact.
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