The Empathic Brain

by Christian Keysers

Overview

In Brief
The discovery of mirror neurons has caused an unparalleled wave of excitement amongst scientists. The Empathic Brain makes you share this excitement. Its vivid and personal descriptions of key experiments make it a captivating and refreshing read. Through intellectually rigorous but powerfully accessible prose, Prof. Christian Keysers makes us realize just how deeply this discovery changes our understanding of human nature. You will start looking at yourselves differently - no longer as mere individual but as a deeply interconnected, social mind.

About the Content
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Your heart beats faster as you watch a tarantula crawl on James Bond’s chest in the movie Dr No, your hands sweat and your skin tingles under the spider’s legs. You feel scared, tense, and finally relieved when Bond manages to escape the danger. We are essentially empathic. But what is empathy? How does your brain enable you to feel so much of what 007 is feeling? How do you connect with people in real life, people you love or even strangers? In this book, you will visit leading labs to find your own answers. The journey starts where ‘mirror neurons’ were discovered. The door of a lab in Parma, Italy, opens to reveal that your motor system not only controls your own body - it becomes automatically activated each time you see others move. A little later, you lie down on a bed and slowly move into the bore of a brain scanner in Marseille, becoming a subject in an experiment that will show how your own sensations and emotions are automatically triggered while you witness those of others. These experiments unravel the mirror in our brain that lets our own actions, sensations and emotions resonate with those of Bond and the people around us. By sharing their inner lives, we connect with them. We are hard-wired for empathy. By looking at autistic individuals and psychopathic criminals, by comparing men and women, by exploring empathy for robots and enemies, this book explores the multifaceted nature of empathy and evidences both its power and limits. Science begins to reveal the wisdom of why so many of the world’s religions command “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

About the Author
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Christian Keysers’ work has been seminal for the scientific study of empathy. Born in 1973, his work has led to publications in the most prominent scientific journals and has made him one of the youngest people to attain the rank of Full Professor. His capacity to explain his science to the wider audience earned him the Marie Curie Excellence Award. He now leads a lab together with his wife at the prestigious Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience of the Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences in Amsterdam. He is a Full Professor at the UMCG and a frequent Visiting Professor at the California Institute of Technology. Outside of the laboratory, his wife Valeria and his daughter Julia are teaching him why empathy is such a gift.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940011397660
Publisher:	Christian Keysers
Publication date:	06/21/2011
Sold by:	Smashwords
Format:	eBook
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

I'm a brain scientist. What drives my work is trying to understand a central characteristic of human nature: our intriguing capacity to feel what happens inside of others. This phenomenon I try to understand is epitomized when we watch Hollywood movies. Remember the scene in the beginning of Matrix, where Keanu Reeves almost slips off the roof? Well, even now, just thinking about that scene, my hands start sweating, I get tense, and my heart is beating faster. Why is it, that my body seems to get ready to fall off the roof, simply because I see someone else in that situation? Why are we so empathic? Why do we not need much effort of thought to feel what goes on in others? During my studies of psychology and biology in Germany, MIT and Harvard, I realized how much looking at how the brain does something tells us about how our mind is made. Over the years, I therefore tried to understand how the brain makes us feel the mind of other people in order to understand how our mind interacts with the people around us. At the end of my PhD in Scotland, I then ran into Vittorio Gallese, an Italian neuroscientist that had just discovered, with his colleagues in Parma, that there are cells in the brain that have an odd dual role. They control our own actions and they respond when we see the actions of others. I intuitively felt that these cells would build a bridge between me and the people I see around me, and immediately decided to join their lab. That same year, I moved from rainy Scotland to sunny Italy with a head full of ideas and a car full of boxes. Together with Vittorio, Giacomo Rizzolatti, Bruno Wicker, Valeria Gazzola and a handful of scientists elsewhere, like Tania Singer, Jean Decety and Marco Iacoboni, we became part of what might be called one of the most exciting period of neuroscience ever. Before, scientists thought that our brain first perceives what other people look like. Then we thinks about other people - much like we think about math or chess - in a purely intellectual way. At the end of all that, we might start planning what to do, for instance to help a person we see in pain. Through the study of these neurons and similar systems for emotions and sensations, we literally turned this understanding of how the brain works upside down. We pieced together a radically new theory of what happens while we watch other people. In this new view, perception, thinking and planning are not separate steps. Just as in the movie example, we found that our brain lets the feelings and actions of others permeate our own body and our own mind. Through this empathic sharing, we become the people around us. We don't need to think or plan, because sharing their fate makes us intuitively feel what they feel and do what is appropriate. Over the years, this work has allowed me to understand many aspects of why humans behave the way they do. It made me wonder why psychopathic individuals kill others without feeling empathy, or why autistic individuals find it hard to understand others. It told me why we sometimes misunderstand others. I have learned to find out when to trust empathy, and when not. It made me look at morality and concepts like projection in a whole new light. Many journalists also asked me these questions, and I loved the articles they wrote. At some point though, I felt it would be time to put it all together in a book that would be fun to read. A book, that conveys the thrill and excitement of making these discoveries; that explains the game changing scientific discoveries we made in a simple, accessible but honest fashion. A book that lets the reader into our labs to show them what we really know; that makes the reader realize how exactly brain science can tell us something about ourselves. A book finally, that inspires people to look at their social lives differently. The decision to move to Italy was not only determining for my scientific career. I started rock-climbing there, and met Valeria Gazzola. Over a period of three years, we feel very deeply in love. A biologist herself, she started to work with me on these questions. Together we built up a great lab in Amsterdam and made a wonderful daughter. I have never felt as happy in my life, as connected. My book is about science, but it is coloured by this feeling I have every day - connecting with the mind of the people I love is probably the most meaningful event in my life. ----- Christian Keysers has a PhD in psychology from the University of St Andrews, Scotland and is a Full Professor at Netherlands' largest medical faculty, the University Medical Center in Groningen. He leads a research group, the Social Brain Lab at the prestigious Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience, a research centre financed by the Royal Netherlands Academy for Arts and Sciences to give outstanding scientists the chance to focus exclusively on research. He is a frequent visiting professor at Caltech, has published in the best academic journals and has published some of the most noted studies on the social brain. He has won the Marie Curie Excellence Award of the European Union for his capacity to make his work accessible to a broad audience.