The Brain by Marco Magrini

Author:Marco Magrini
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781780723846
Publisher: Short Books Ltd

6.3.2 Empathy

Empathy arrived in the world 65 million years ago, when a huge asteroid collided with what is now the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. It is estimated that three quarters of animal species were erased by that historic event, which spelt the end of the Cretaceous Period, as well as the dominion of the ruling species: the dinosaurs.

This is how mammals came forth. Over the following 43 million years (the period known as Paleogene), starting with something vaguely resembling a mouse, they diversified to the point of dividing the hereditary line into different orders, such as Chiroptera (bats), Cetacea (whales), Perissodactyla (horses) and Primates (a species of which being Homo sapiens). Consequently, the dominion of eggs was replaced by that of placentas.

And a totally different parenting style.

The egg can look after itself and no sooner does it hatch than the newborn reptile is ready to operate in the world. In the case of mammals with placentas, however, the young offspring needs care, protection, warmth and food. It also needs to be taught quite a few things, varying in number depending on the species: no species is schooled as long as Homo sapiens. The limbic system has evolved in order to manage the emotional signals necessary for a new, emerging sociability [p42]. And sociability requires the ability to understand, as far as possible, other people’s needs.

This ability is called theory of mind. It means to be aware of the fact that other people’s mental states, such as their wishes and intentions, exist and are separate from ours. This is not a negligible detail, since you don’t have access to another encephalon and yet you take it for granted that it is full of thoughts like your own.

Take one step up from theory of mind and you get to empathy. That is, the entirely human ability to put oneself into the shoes of another brain. Or of several brains at once. Although chimpanzees have a rudimentary theory of mind and a certain degree of empathic ability, they are unable to conceive of things like ‘I imagine Mary knows that I would very much like her to make up with Albert, but I wouldn’t want her to then go and tell Sarah everything’. This is exclusively human stuff.

Empathy is not strictly connected to an area of the brain, there is no consensus on its definition, and many ways of cataloguing it have been suggested. It definitely contains a wide range of emotions, from sensing the thoughts and feelings of another brain to the desire to help and support it if the need arises. In some cases, one can experience the same emotions as somebody else, as though there were a wireless connection between the respective limbic systems. In many cases, one can feel the pain of a person known only through TV news coverage, but never actually met. And, in the darkness of a cinema, one’s brain can even worry about the fate of a character who doesn’t actually exist.

Empathy, a necessity in

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