the habit of wonder

Watching someone else getting an injection always makes me flinch, if only within (I’m not what you’d call expressive). That sense of inner recoil as the needle goes in is something so palpable—and yet so thin, so fleeting as to afterward seem merely imagined.

But we live in a time when the evanescent can be captured by equipment, and located with almost spooky precision. Now researchers have found that watching a needle prick someone else’s hand inhibits neurons connected to a specific corresponding spot on the witness’s hand, as they would if the witness were the one actually receiving the injection.

It’s as though our brain has specifically identified where the other person has been hurt and mapped this information onto our own mental body map. The finding adds to an emerging picture that suggests we empathize with other people’s pain by simulating their suffering in our own central nervous system….The amount of activity triggered in a participant’s hand muscle was reduced when they watched a video of someone being injected in that same hand region, but not when they watched a foot injection, a tomato being injected or a non-painful cue tip being used instead.

In such “mirror neuron” effects we find that the supposedly impenetrable line between self and other begins to break down. In fact, our very brains are sculpted by others, as Harvard psychologist Stephen Kosslyn explains:

“When you learn something knew, it’s not your liver that changed, not your heart, it’s your brain—there have been new connections set up. When you learn about someone else, essentially part of your brain has changed, I mean it has to have otherwise you wouldn’t store it in memory.”

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 14th, 2005 at 5:26 am (CT) and is filed under Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS feed. Edit this entry.