The Empathic Brain

There is the affective component, which refers to an ability to recognize and share someone else’s emotions, and there is the cognitive component, which involves an assessment of the emotions you are seeing in someone else, and a decision as to how you might respond.

Empathy is the capacity to create mindsight images of other people’s minds. These you-maps enable us to sense the internal mental stance of another person, not just to attune to their state of mind. Attunement is important, but the middle prefrontal cortex also moves us from this resonance and feeling-with to the more complex perceptual capacity to

The human capacity for empathy is rooted in the mirror neuron system and its ability to observe and interpret the physical actions of others. Your body responds sympathetically to another person’s movement because humans instinctively try to understand one another.

Empathy is a classic “soft” communication skill, but it has a physical basis. When we closely observe a person’s face, gestures, and tone of voice, our brain begins to align