On measuring empathy

The second episode of The Brain: A Secret History explores the issue of emotions: what they are, what role they play, etc.

It was interesting to note the conclusion that even 'rational' decisions are based upon emotional response, and that our ability to rationalise is impaired when we lose the ability to feel emotional responses.

But I was particularly interested in the area of empathy. Probably because I have a tendency to feel the emotions of others so powerfully, that it can have a disruptive effect on my own life. Michael Mosley was tested for empathy and found to be far from as empathetic as he had believed. But I would question the results of the test, and here's why.

The test involved exposing Mosley to a series of video clips of people being subjected to mild-to-moderate pain experiences (mainly being pinched on the back of the hand), and then being subjected to a comparable experience himself (he was smacked on the back of the hand with a ruler). His brain activity was measured during both activities and then compared. To what extent was the brain activity of his own pain replicated when he witnessed someone else's pain?

One major flaw in the experiment for me is the following: during the video clips, he did not seem to be shown the faces of the people being hurt. Just the physical act of the pinch. If empathy is about emotion, I suspect the replication sought would be more obvious if the subject were to see the manifestation of pain on the faces of the filmed subjects.

Furthermore, if empathy is about emotion, it is far more likely that an empathetic response would be exhibited when observing a subject experiencing emotional, rather than physical anguish. While I don't think I'd be terribly impressed to see one person pinch another, I can be utterly incapacitated by someone else's emotional trauma. The episode began with Mosley climbing into a small, dark, underground space, where he experienced genuine fear. I found my own heart rate and anxiety to be significantly elevated while watching him.

Of course, the tricky part here is that in order to assess the level of empathy, the subject has to observe someone else in emotional distress, and then be subjected to emotional distress him/herself.

This brings an issue of ethics into the story. One can hardly publicly humiliate people or give them news of a fictitious bereavement in the name of science. But perhaps it would be possible to ask for volunteers to enter the 'fear cave' after watching others do so. Perhaps one might also be able to establish a benchmark of the brain areas activated after a bereavement, and then to record brain activity of people watching someone who has been bereaved. It would be difficult, but surely not impossible to obtain suitable data and material without being unethical.

Just wondering....

Learning in the outer edges of consciousness

Mo Costandi is a neuroscience postgraduate who writes in such a way that even lay people like me can follow most of what he has to say. Being fascinated by the mind and its relation to the brain, I am regular reader of his neurophilosophy blog.

One recent post sparks my interest as a learning geek. Have you ever wondered under what conditions a person would cease to learn? I have. I had a friend who used to teach children labelled 'ineducable'. She regularly shared stories about how her young charges would show signs that they could in fact learn.

Mo's post on 21 September shares findings that patients diagnosed as being minimally conscious or vegetative (not the same thing, read the post) can in fact learn, that there might be an awareness of surroundings even in those who exhibit no signs of such awareness.

This is exciting stuff!

Going slowly gaga

When I was young and arrogant and in full possession of my faculties (now that I am older and arrogant and watching them slip through my fingers...) I use to say loudly that I would rather lose my mind than my mobility in my dotage.

I would announce this in that overloud way that people have when they think they are saying something profound that everyone would say... if only they had thought of it first.

In my mind's eye was my great-grandmother, who had once been a pillar of her community as the wife of a vicar in Zululand. By the time I came along, she was unable to walk without a stick.

I also pictured my grandfather, a bluff, brusque man who had always been early to bed and early to rise, who walked 5 miles twice a day with his dogs. But who had to admit defeat and pay a contractor to come and fix his roof, because he could no longer get up there to do it himself. Who had to part company with his car, because his middle-aged children had begun to refer to his 'parking' as 'abandoning the vehicle'.

To my mind they were dying in pieces, while their still-sound minds kicked and rebelled against the imprisonment of their bodies. I so desperately didn't want that fate.

I pictured myself comfortably lost in a world of my own creation, blissfully unaware that this kindly middle-aged couple were my son and daughter-in-law and forgetting that this irascible scamp was my great-grandson and not my son.

I forgot about the bit inbetween.

In recent years, I have met people in the early stages of Alzheimer's. People who have begun to lose themselves. People who are still cogniscent as they watch their congition being eroded. I knew a man whose wife searched high and low for replacement kettle that looked like the one he had accidentally destroyed by forgetting to fill it up before switching it on. Whe she failed, it was a catastrophe for him. When he walked into the kitchen, with his mind set on a cup of tea, the familiar sight of the kettle was no longer there to serve as a comfortable beacon. The new kettle was unfamiliar and consequently invisible. He would stand there, helpless. With no idea of what it was he had wanted to do and whether or not he had in fact achieved his aim. Was he coming? Or going?

A friend's mother has slowly been lost to Alzheimer's. She is happy, now, for the most part. Her husband is the one who is desolate. But there was a time when she was aware of her encroaching unawareness and it filled her with stark terror. Like in one of the Neverending Story movies where The Nothing consumes Fantasia until all that is left is a single grain of sand.

It is an unspeakably horrible thing.

As middle age and information overload take their toll, I find myself occasionally losing a word mid-sentence. I reach for it and it is gone. Poof! I walk into a room and wonder why I am there. Usually, a moment's pause will be sufficient for the word to resurface. And by retracing my steps, I can usually find my derailed train of thought and rediscover my purpose for being in a certain room.

But these moments fill me with dread. Is it the beginning of an irreversible slide? Is it inevitable? Will I be asking the same question every five minutes of kindly people whose names I can't remember, but who call me "Sweetheart" and "Mom". Will I be mourning the disappearance of my husband while some grey-haired old codger tells me over and over that he is that man? Pshaw! Who does he think he's fooling? My husband is a dashing young man without an ounce of fat on him anywhere. He opens the batting for a first division cricket side, you know. Not bad for a Swede!

Think of the prodigious minds we encounter in this space. Lucky for us, they are pouring their thoughts into a space where we can always come back to them again. Not so lucky for them if they find themselves reading an article and thinking, "Hmm. Not bad. I should look for more work by this writer. I wonder who it is?" Only to find that they are reading an article they wrote.

Urk. Sorry to be so depressing.

Where is your mind?

During the recent Connectivism Conference, Bill Kerr posed the following question:

“What is the mind, where is it and how does it work?”

This question formed part of his challenge to connectivism as a learning theory. However, it struck a chord with me last night when my husband read me a report called The Power of Hope in Time magazine of 12 February.

The report is largely based on an anecdote from the author, Scott Haig, MD. He was treating a patient with terminal lung cancer that had metasticised. The patient's brain tissue had been completely replaced by brain tumours, and he had entered the final moments of his life. He had been unconscious and completely incapacitated for some time. Then, suddenly, in the last moments of his life, this man regained consciousness and made very lucid farewells to his family.

As Dr Haig says:

"it wasn't David's brain that woke him up to say goodbye that Friday. His brain had already been destroyed. Tumor metastases don't simply occupy space and press on things, leaving a whole brain. The metastases actually replace tissue. Where that gray stuff grows, the brain is just not there. What woke my patient that Friday was simply his mind, forcing its way through a broken brain"

All our advanced, sophisticated understanding of the brain has still left us a long way short of finding, let alone understanding the mind. If a man with effectively no brain still has a mind, still has a will, where does that leave us? Will our on-going study of the physical brain really tell us what we need to know about that which makes us essentially who we are?

There are so many sciences associated with the brain. Haig summarises:

"Neuroanatomy is largely concerned with which spots in the brain do what; which chemicals have which effects at those spots is neurophysiology. Plan on feeding those chemicals to a real person's brain, and you're doing neuropharmacology. Although they are concerned with myriad, complex, amazing things, none of these disciplines seem to find the mind. Somehow it's "smaller" than the tracts, ganglia and nuclei of the brain's gross anatomy--but "bigger" than the cells and molecules of the brain's physiology. We really should have bumped into it on the way down. Yet we have not. Like our own image in still water, however sharp, when we reach to grasp it, it just dissolves."

Haig is not the first doctor to be amazed at the power of the mind over the brain. Extensive research identifies that a specific part of the brain deals with such-and-such a skill, then along comes a girl with half a brain or a young man with no brain to speak of ("Is Your Brain Really Necessary," Science Dec. 12, 1980, p. 1232.) and defies all that we think we know. People constantly learn new skills and/or rehabilitate from the loss of physical and neurological functions - the mind forcing the brain into new pathways by dint of will. As Haig says elsewhere in the article, "a mind or will, clearly separate, hovers under the machinery, forcing it toward a goal."

I know it sounds cheesy, but Haig's article made my heart sing - we truly are wonderfully made, and we are a long way from unravelling the mysteries of how it all works! I will quote his final paragrph in its entirety to end this post:

"But many think the mind is only in there--existing somehow in the physical relationship of the brain's physical elements. The physical, say these materialists, is all there is. I fix bones with hardware. As physical as this might be, I cannot be a materialist. I cannot ignore the internal evidence of my own mind. It would be hypocritical. And worse, it would be cowardly to ignore those occasional appearances of the spirits of others--of minds uncloaked, in naked virtue, like David's goodbye."