Posts Tagged ‘fMRI’

Difficult to Detect a Broken Heart

Tuesday, May 12th, 2009

The Neuroscience of Compassion

Targets of bullying experience rejection by cowardly co-workers, indifference from HR and senior management, and limited tolerance by friends and family. Why aren’t people more compassionate? Why don’t they see the pain and help more? Brand new research suggests that we humans are wired to quickly and empathically react to the physical pain of others. For example, watching someone break an ankle and step on it triggers pain centers in our own brains nearly immediately.

However, social pain or the mental anguish of others takes longer to trigger a response and that reaction requires much more brain work. For example, when a woman with cerebral palsy laments that she has never been kissed and probably will never have a romantic relationship, it should trigger a compassionate response. It does, but it takes time. The latency and location of neurological responses are tracked by fMRI. The research was done by Mary Helen Immordino-Yang and Antonio Damasio at USC’s Brain and Creativity Institute. (Paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)

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