A new study reveals how certain neurons are “wired” to perceive the pain experience of others, and could be the source of empathy between humans.
- The insula, a hidden brain region inside the brain, is known to play a vital role in our own emotions. It can sense the state of our body through input from our internal organs and skin, and integrates this information with what we see, hear, and smell. It is thought to be the source of those conscious feelings called emotions.
- Showing empathy, kindness and gentleness towards patients can reduce their perception of pain by 12%, more than some drugs, according to a recent study.
A key mechanism of empathy? Researchers from the Netherlands Institute of Neuroscience (NIN) have shown that the pain felt by others is directly mapped onto our neurons in the insula, a region of the brain involved in experiencing our own emotions.
Our neurons are “a mirror of the pain of others”
As part of their work, published in the journal eLife, the researchers were able to measure the cerebral activity of patients thanks to the electrodes which were directly implanted in their brain (initially to locate the origin of their epilepsy). They showed participants video clips of a woman expressing different levels of pain, then measured how strongly neurons in the insula responded to the pain the patients observed in the actress. The objective, to determine if the neurons of the patients “experienced” a level of pain similar to that felt by others.
This is exactly what they found: throughout the insula, they recorded an electrical activity which evolved according to the pain that the patients had perceived in the woman in the films. Clearly, the more intense the pain (played by the actress), the higher the brain activity of the patients. Our own neurons are “like a mirror of the pain of others”can we read in a communicated. This gives, according to the researchers, “a key insight into human empathy: we apparently sympathize with the pain of others because our brains are ‘wired’ to turn their pain into activity in regions involved in our own pain.”
Identify the causes of differences in empathy between individuals?
But how do we concretely perceive the pain of others? In half of the videos, the camera was focused on the woman’s face, which went from a neutral expression to a more or less painful expression in a second: in this case, more than the movement of the face itself, it is the twitch of the actress’s eyes that the volunteers’ brain used to perceive pain. In the other half of the videos, the camera was fixed on the actress’s hand which was struck by a belt: here, it is the movement of the hand under the shock of the belt which allowed the patients to evaluate the level of pain.
“The suffering of others can be inferred from a variety of indicators: a painful expression, the intensity of the event that inflicts pain on them, etc. [Cela] reveals the flexibility with which the human brain transforms what we see others doing into a fine perception of their inner states”, concludes Eye Soyman, lead author of the study. The team’s future research will ultimately develop a map of where in the brain the pain of others turns into empathy, and identify regions where differences between individuals could explain striking discrepancies in empathy. that we can observe in each other.
