![]() Thus, compassion has the potential to neutralize a desire for aggression, punishment or revenge. If meditation can enhance empathy and compassion in individuals who have had, from birth, little or no capacity for empathy and compassion, imagine what it can do for the rest of us.Ĭompassion has been described as having a radiating effect, spreading kindness and forgiveness to others, even those who have treated us badly. Mantra meditation, in particular, has been found to be useful in children between 3 and 14 years of age (Sequeira, Ahmed, 2012). Recent research suggests that meditation may prove effective for autistics at both the behavioral and molecular levels. Autistic children are, in essence, unable to create self-consciousness, thus they are unable to unable to understand the consciousness of others.īut researchers are making a concerted effort to explore meditation as a strategy to override malfunctioning brain systems and the debilitating symptoms of autism. A study published in the January 2006 issue of Nature Neuroscience found that malfunctioning mirror neurons play a central role in the autistic child’s social isolation or inability to connect. ![]() The mirror neuron system seems to be involved not in the rational sort of empathy involved in deliberately imagining yourself in another’s shoes but in the deep, automatic empathy of really feeling what another person is feeling.īut what happens when something goes wrong with the mirror neuron system? Autistics, for example, don’t have the ability to understand, from observing other people, what it feels like to be sad, angry, disgusted or surprised, nor do they naturally grasp the significance of those emotions. So, thanks to mirror neurons, all social animals - from dogs to humans - may be hardwired for empathy, while absorbing and integrating cultural and environmental influences along the way. We enjoy observing and predicting their movements, and in our minds, perhaps, it is as if we are performing ourselves. Mirroring enables us to “read minds” and predict others’ intentions or behaviors, which may help explain the broad appeal of observing virtuoso performances by others who are engaged in, for example, sports, dance, or music. The lesson is more impactive when empathy is demonstrated, rather than just “taught.” And that applies to moral behaviors, as well.Ĭhildren learn empathy best from parents who react empathically to others. But many movement skills can’t be solely taught through contagion or through verbal instruction, as anyone who’s ever tried to help a baby learn to walk or teach a child to ride a bicycle knows. In emotional contagion, we “catch” an emotion from another person at a subconscious level. These regulatory systems are believed to develop almost immediately in baby behaviors, especially contagious behaviors, such as a newborn baby responding to a laugh with a laugh, as in this popular video of quadruplets laughing at each other, which very well may trigger some contagious laughter from you, too. So in addition to forming the biological basis of empathy, mirror neurons may also form the basis of learned, imitative and contagious behaviors. Mirror neurons also function as a cognitive subsystem that enables the mind to simulate and then imitate the observed movement sequences of others. We humans have an incredibly complex mirror neuron system that encompasses our entire sensory system, and allows us to simulate the emotional lives of others. It was as if the monkeys were imitating - mirroring - another’s movements in its mind. These mirror neurons also activated when the monkeys simply observed another monkey making that same movement sequence. They found that neurons in the premotor areas of the frontal cortex that prime movement sequences (such as grasping an object) were actually activating milliseconds before the hand movement had even occurred. Giacomo Rizzolatti and a team of Italian neuroscientists were studying monkey brain systems that regulate intentional hand movements and discovered a system of neurons that specialize in the “walking in another’s shoes” function (Rizzolatti et al, 1996, 2001, 2004). Mirror neurons were accidentally discovered in the mid-1990s. In that split second, you can understand how that poor victim feels - it’s as if it’s happening to you. Mirror neurons are specialized nerve cells in the insular region of the brain’s frontal cortex that generate empathy. If you’ve ever watched a movie and tensed, winced or flinched when the villain raises a knife to slash someone, that’s your mirror neurons firing.
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