Sublime

Empathy is deeply engraved in the architecture of our brain.

6 The emotional brain is at the heart of the central nervous system, and its key task is to look out for your welfare.

The amazingly adaptive perceptual functions of the back of the cortex have embedded that object into your body-maps so that it is neurally experienced like an extension of your body. This is how we can drive rapidly on a freeway or park a car in a tight space, use a scalpel with precision, or attain a .300 batting average.

The blood supply to the brainstem and the nerves arising there is crucial to the function of the five cranial nerves whose function is necessary for the state of social engagement, which includes the ventral branch of the vagus nerve.

In the 1890s Wilhelm Wundt, the founder of experimental psychology, formulated the doctrine of “affective primacy.”7 Affect refers to small flashes of positive or negative feeling that prepare us to approach or avoid something. Every emotion (such as happiness or disgust) includes an affective reaction, but most of our affective reactions are too

The limbic system and the frontoparietal network are two key players on this team. The limbic system, a network of brain structures such as the amygdala and the hippocampus, is the passionate team member, playing a key role in our emotional responses and interacting with other brain areas for complex emotional processing.