Animal Empathy

The ability to empathise is often considered uniquely human, the result of complex reasoning and abstract thought. But it might in fact be an incredibly simple brain process ­ meaning that there is no reason why monkeys and other animals cannot empathise too.

That is the conclusion of Christian Keysers of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands and his colleagues. The team used a functional MRI scanner to monitor volunteers while their legs were touched and while they watched videos of other people being touched and of objects colliding.

To the team's surprise, a sensory area of the brain called the secondary somatosensory cortex, thought only to respond to physical touch, was strongly activated by the sight of others being touched.This suggests that empathy requires no specialised brain area. The brain simply transforms what we see into what we would have felt in the same situation. "Empathy is not an abstract capacity," Keysers concludes. "It's like you slip into another person's shoes to share the experience in a very pragmatic way."                                                                                   The mechanism behind emotions in rats promises to shed light on the nature of human emotions like empathy and nurturing. Jaak Panksepp, professor of veterinary and comparative anatomy, pharmacy and physiology at the Washington State University, agrees with research which shows how rats helped other rats with no explicit rewards at stake.

Panksepp, who has pioneered work in how core emotions stem from deep, ancient parts of the brain, said the scientific community has been resistant towards the notion that "non-human animals have emotional experiences...".

But he argues that recent advances in neuroscience are letting researchers look at how animal affect, or emotions, control learning, memory and behaviour, the journal Science reports.

"Simplified models of empathy, as in mice and rats, offer new inroads for understanding our own social-emotional nature and nurture," he writes, according to a Washington statement.

"Such knowledge may eventually help us promote nurturant behaviours in humans," said Panksepp.                                           SOURCE: twocircles.net...New Scientist .....Youtube

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