A new study conducted by researchers by the University of Virginia, published in 2013 on Social cognitive and affective neurosciencesupports a discovery that is gaining more and more impetus, fueled by the scientific findings of the last few years: the human brain It is designed to connect with others in such a strong way that it is as if that experience that others experience themselves by happening to us.
This would seem to neuronal base of empathy – The ability to feel what others feel – but it goes beyond this. The results of this last study, in fact, suggest that our brain does not respond differentiated to what happens to us and what happens to someone emotionally close to us, and also show that we seem to be neurologically unable to generate such a level of empathy For foreign people.
To discover this, the researchers used a somewhat “medieval” method. The participants in the study were subjected to a functional magnetic resonance imaging while they were threatened to be subjected to an electric discharge, or that it was administered to a friend or a foreign person.
The results showed how those regions of the brain that usually activate in front of one Personal threat – the front insula, the Putamen and the surcharge – did not show activities when the researchers threatened an extraneous person of electric shock, but instead they activated substantially in a similar way to the situation of threat to their own person when they were threatened by friends.
“The correlation-activation between oneself and loved ones is almost identical” says James Coan, professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and co-author of the study. “The results show the great ability of the human brain to model themselves in relation to others; the people with whom we have a bond of emotional closeness They become parts of ourselves, and this is not just a metaphor or poetry, it is something truly real. We literally perceive the threat when a friend is threatened. But not when a foreign person is. “
This result strengthens a statement made by the progenitor and popularizer of the “interpersonal neurobiology”, Daniel Siegel, who has supported in a convincing way that our minds are partly defined and shaped by theirs interact with other minds. In other ways, we are designed to “synchronize” with others, and the more we synchronize (the more we connect psycho-emotionally) the less our brains recognize distinctions between themselves and the other.
Research on this topic also fits very well with the study conducted by the evolutionist psychologist Robin Dunbar, who showed how there We have evolved to connect cognitively in relatively small groups (approximately 150 people or not).
Beyond that number our brain is struggling to connect with others. From an evolutionary point of view this seems to make sense, because the possibilities of “survival” for ourselves and for the group are amplified when we can optimize, synchronizing them, our cognitive resources.
As Coan says, “when we develop a friendship, we can trust and rely on who, after all, become ‘us’; in this way our resources are amplified, we are enhanced. Your goal becomes mine. It is part of our survival”.
