Tuesday, July 5, 2016

Is to perceive to suffer? Interview with Anjali Krishnan on empathetic pain perception!

Imagine falling on the road and hurting yourself. Now imagine watching the same event happen to someone else. Would you react similarly to both these situations? Would your brain respond alike to your own pain vs. to other's pain. Aristotle once said, 'To perceive is to suffer'. According to him, your reaction would match. But is that true?!

Anjali Krishnan and her colleagues at University of Colorado Boulder set out to find answer to this question of similarities and differences in perceiving self and empathetic pain. Surprisingly, and excitingly, they found that our brain looks at these kinds of pain differently. Empathy for other people's pain involves the process of mentalization: imagining other's situation and condition. To know more about the interesting observation, please listen to interview with Anjali.



To know more, please read here:
Somatic and vicarious pain are represented by dissociable multivariate brain patterns.
Krishnan et al., eLife 2016;5:e15166.

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