Mirror Neurones and empathy

Empathy Circles are a hands on, walking the talk, empathy practice. The circles are based in science from many different disciplines such as psychology, neuroscience, biology, philosophy and arts (i.e. dance and literature). When developing the empathy circles, we did not want to get fussy over the term while getting distracted from the real important outcomes of the volumes of books, scientific studies and practices developed. We therefore decided to take a blended approach to empathy and started to actually practice in the empathy circles what all these different disciplines had to say about it. We blended science and practice to both decipher what empathy looks and feels like as well as figure out what works and what does not work in practice. Combining the different disciplines lead us to propose five phases of empathy: Self-empathy, mirrored empathy, reflective empathy, imaginative empathy and empathic creativity or -action. At the core of these five phases of empathy are different levels of synchronicity between two or more people.

Empathy Circles are meant to be a hands-on method in supporting your practice.

« Mets-toi à ma place! » Si souvent, nous croyons y parvenir; si souvent nous devons reconnaître qu’on n’y arrive pas. « Empathie » est le terme qui décrit cet effort, ce désir, cette victoire et cet échec.
Ce livre raconte l’histoire complexe et fascinance de cette idée, parcourant le temps depuis les philosophes grecs jusqu’aux androïdes, et croisant les disciplines comme la philosophie et la psychologie, l’anthropologie et l’hsitoire, l’esthétique et l’éthique, les études culturelles et les neurosciences.

This paper introduces a new futures method, Scenario Art, which involves the use of visual
representations of future scenarios to support decision-making towards sustainable development.
Based on preliminary investigations it is proposed that Scenario Art has the capacity to increase a
person’s level of empathy, creativity and responsiveness to risk; and on this basis has great potential
to facilitate decision-making processes and outcomes that demonstrate sustainable thinking. To
illustrate the application and support the proposed value of Scenario Art an overview of a recent
futures workshop, which applied the new method, is provided. This paper aims to inspire the further
development and utilisation of Scenario Art.

One of the Buddha's most significant insights created through his Awakening to ‘Pure awareness’ was that the self is developed by a complementary dualist perspective and this distinction between a subject and object is an arbitrary convention.  Nonetheless, there is no denying that the belief of the innate substantiality of separation of subject and object is extremely persistent. As professor A. J. Diekman suggests, “In fact, our experience is fundamentally dualistic—not the dualism of mind and matter—but that of the I and that which is observed.” 4 Yet, if the separation of subject and object is a fallacy, then why do people persist in viewing the world this way?  This chapter explores that question.

This is an article that I wrote to suggest to biologists that they should take sociology more seriously.  Judging from comments I had back from reviewers, lots of biologists disagree with this--too bad!  It has been published, and is out there for all to read now.  The official abstract is below!

Abstract
Mirror neurons” describe complementary affective neural activity that occurs in the brains of two different primates because they are both doing or observing the same action.  Empathy, sympathy, and other emotional responses involving “taking the role of the other” are inferred to be the consequence of these emotional capacities.  Mirror neurons were first described in the 1980s using the results of brain imaging studies.  But, a similar conclusion about “mirroring capacity” is also reflected in over one hundred years of observational research in sociology.  Early sociologists described how the social order is maintained and reproduced using the concept of the “looking glass self” which they view as an entity that exists between the biological being and a social being.

'Of all the teachings, the ultimate is Emptiness, of which compassion is the very essence. It is like a very powerful medicine, a panacea that can cure every disease in the world. And just like that very powerful medicine, the realization of the truth of Emptiness, the nature of reality, is the remedy for all the different negative emotions.' Atiśa Dipankara Shrijnana (980-1054 CE) Compassion (karunā) is as important an aspect of the Path as Wisdom. The Buddha often spoke of compassion in understanding that there is suffering and doing what will best help to alleviate that suffering as the most beneficial and moral of all behaviors. Knowing that there is dukkha is the strongest incentive for living a life of compassionate behavior toward ourselves as well as toward others. Compassion for ourselves and compassion for others are not mutually exclusive. As we advance on the Path to Enlightenment by progressively developing purified mental dispositions and behaviors, we gain insight into the subjectivity of our identity and how we confound our understanding of the world through the misconception of an inherent dualistic reality. As we become less enchanted and fascinated with our 'I' and we begin to detach from our cravings and identifications, we develop both wisdom and compassion. Like two wings that work together in flight, each of these qualities supports the other. Wisdom distinguishes beneficial from non-beneficial, while compassion moves us to action. This short article explores a Buddha Inspired Psychology with the integration of several Main themes of the Buddha's teachings with modern psychological perspectives.

The article focuses on the psychological dimensions of readers’ engagements with young adult climate change fiction. It argues that that the embodied simulation of a fictional climate-changed world can offer much more than simple entertainment or escapism. Instead, it has the potential to impact teenagers’ understanding of the social, economic, and ecological risks associated with climate change and to give them a better sense of the vulnerability of their current lives and lifestyles. By way of example, the article draws on research in cognitive literary studies, neuroscience, and the psychology of fiction to examine the narrative strategies of Paolo Bacigalupi’s YA cli-fi novel Ship Breaker. It demonstrates how the novel’s depiction of a dystopian future cues both negative emotions and more positive emotions in in order to warn about the future risks of climate change and still make the reading experience pleasurable for young readers.

Emotional Training
A practical guide to emotional management

How can we cope with our natural death anxiety and create the sense of a safe place in the changing world? How can we efficiently cope with crisis and trauma? How can we learn to create relationships and find love? How can we realize our potential and be happy? And can we do all this without approaching psychotherapy or counseling or coaching?

Dr. Dror Green has researched hundreds approaches to psychotherapy, and found that they all ignore our inborn emotional skills, which enable us to attune ourselves to reality, avoid crisis, realize our potential and be happy. Emotional Training is a simple and practical way of life, based on improving our emotional skills and creating a sense of a safe place.

Emotional Training is based on a new concept of human nature

The myth of the 'mind' and the belief in the separation between body and mind have been the corner stones of Western culture for more than 2,000 years, but they remain vague. Dr. Dror Green has defined a new, revolutionary concept of human nature that regards emotions as physical responses to stimuli from reality. This concept is compatible with new researches in neuroscience and the understanding that empathy is inborn. The emotional process is not a mystical concept, as is customarily assumed, but the autopilot that navigates our lives, warns us of dangers and directs us to a safe place.

Emotional Training suggests a new understanding of our lives

Emotional Training is an efficient path to a healthy and productive life, and it also enables us to review all aspects of our lives: interpersonal relationships, professional relationships, social and political systems, thought and research, creativity and art. Emotional Training supplies us with efficient ways of coping with the challenges of the 21st century, global warming and the Internet revolution.

Dr. Dror Green is a psychotherapist, lecturer and supervisor. He is the director of the Institute of Emotional Training in Bulgaria, where he gives seminars to couples, parents, directors, etc. He has trained psychotherapists, psychiatrists, psychologists and educators. He was one of the pioneers of online psychotherapy and developed the first online clinic. He is also a musician, an illustrator and the author of about 40 books for children, adults and professionals

Psychopaths seem to be everywhere. They are on the news and at the movies. People who lack empathy, be they ruthless entrepreneurs or crazed ‘spree killers’ are frequently labeled psychopathic; the charming socializer is just as suspect as the awkward anti-social loner. The conception of what defines a psychopath seems to be a morass of contradictions, the only consistency being the supposition of a lack of empathy.

The Psychopath Factory: How Capitalism Organizes Empathy examines how the requirements, stimuli, affects and environments of work condition our empathy. In some cases work calls for no empathy – characters who don’t blink or flinch in the face of danger nor crack under pressure. In other cases capitalism requires empathy in spades – charming, friendly, sensitive and listening managers, customer service agents and carers.

When workers are required to either ignore their empathy to do a job, or dial it up to increase productivity, they are entering a psychopathic modality. The affective blitz of work, flickering screens, emotive content, vibrating alerts and sounding alarms erode our sensitivities whilst we are modulated with attention stimulants, social lubricants and so called anti-anxiety drugs. This is amidst a virulent and exacerbating climate of competition and frenzied quantification. Capitalism pressures us to feign empathy and leverage social relationships on one hand, whilst being cold and pragmatic on the other. We are passionate and enthusiastic whilst keeping a professional distance.

Sympathy, care, compassion and altruism are important; The Psychopath Factory: How Capitalism Organizes Empathy argues that it is a mistake to presuppose that empathy can achieve these. Rather than being subject to the late capitalist organization of our empathy, psychopathy could be a means of escape.

A Memética é, então, a ciência que estuda como memes se propagam. O que a genética faz com os genes, a Memética faz com os memes. Ou, mais precisamente, o que a genética de populações e a epidemiologia fazem com as informações genéticas, a Memética faz com as informações culturais. O ponto a ser discutido então é apenas se os modelos matemáticos aplicados na primeira podem também ser usados na segunda. Isso, é claro, levanta enormes problemas. Será que a cultura realmente pode ser dividida em unidades de informação? De que são feitos os memes? Como eles são passados? Como saber se eles foram realmente passados ou não? O que determina que um meme vai infectar a mente de uma pessoa e de outra não? Quem manda no meu comportamento sou eu ou meus memes? Eu posso escolher quais memes vão me infectar? Utilizar modelos biológicos para tratar a cultura não seria reducionista e mecanicista? [...] É com este espírito que o livro foi escrito. Mas, antes de tudo, é um livro de divulgação científica. Pretende dar ao leitor a fundamentação filosófica e científica para discutir os conceitos aqui tratados. Pode, então, ser lido por um não-filósofo que só sabe de biologia aquilo que aprendeu na escola

Affective Relations: The Transnational Politics of Empathy explores the power dynamics underlying the contemporary affective injunction to ‘be empathetic’ and their complex social and geopolitical implications.  Through analysis of a rage of popular and scholarly sites and texts – including Obama’s speeches and memoirs, best-selling business books, international development literatures, popular science tracts, postcolonial literature and feminist, anti-racist and queer theory – the book investigates the possibilities, risks and contradictions of figuring empathy as an affective tool for engendering transnational social justice.  Opening up ways of thinking and feeling empathetic politics beyond universalist calls to ‘put oneself in the others’ shoes’, it examines empathy’s dynamic links to processes of location, translation, imagination and attunement.  Affective Relations is interested throughout in how empathy might be translated differently - how dominant liberal, neoliberal and neocolonial visions and practices of empathy can be reinterpreted in the context of transnationality to activate alternative affective connections, solidarities and potentialities.

This article takes its inspiration from Wickramasekera II’s empathic involvement theory of hypnosis. That model illuminates the mutual territory of hypnosis and empathy—common to much interaction between hypnotist and subject, and to the internal process of subjects as they enact suggestions of the hypnotist. However, the present article suggests that the overlap is not as ubiquitous as the empathic involvement theory asserts. Other aspects of hypnosis involve disengagement from real persons in the environment and dissociating from other ego states of the self. Amnesia and certain uses of focused attention in the hypnotic context run counter to empathy. The fantasizer type of high hypnotizables experiences hypnosis more empathically than do the equally hypnotizable dissociater type. This article also explores the relationship of hypnosis and empathy to other related states, including meditation, dreaming, and psychedelic drugs. The conclusion is that empathy is an important component of many hypnotic phenomena, but that the relationship is as partial and complex as the manner in which other traits, such as imagery ability and dissociation, map onto hypnosis.

We must conceive of a primordial We [On] that has its own authenticity and furthermore never ceases but continues to uphold the greatest passions of our adult life and to be experienced anew in each of our perceptions. The Philosopher and his Shadow (S:175)

This essay celebrates a nearly four year collaboration with Dr. James E. Beichler to whom I owe a great debt of gratitude for rigorously exploring these insights in his own publications and also co-authoring a paper published in these proceedings. I have quoted him here in recognition of our mutual understanding and referenced how he has addressed these insights in many of his papers in my bibliography. It is shown here how point-centered processes could have generated all phenomena and the expansion of our universe including non-material consciousness. He and I agree that a dimensionless mechanism, its dimensional byproducts, and measurements could have produced what is physical, emotional, mental, soulful, and spiritual.

“Before that moment of time [i.e., the beginning of spacetime], all science has to rely on is
unfounded speculation, or at least that was the situation before Riemannian geometry was modified by incorporating point-elements and Andrews developed his intuitive notion of a 0-D point Void. Everything in our scientific model of reality changes by adopting the 0-D point Void as the original Riemannian point-element from which our more advanced Riemannian space-time structure of physical reality evolved.” - James E. Beichler (2017) p.4

In spite of the remarkable progress made in the burgeoning field of social neuroscience, the neural mechanisms that underlie social encounters are only beginning to be studied and could —paradoxically— be seen as representing the ‘dark matter’ of social neuroscience. Recent conceptual and empirical developments consistently indicate the need for investigations, which allow the study of real-time social encounters in a truly interactive manner. This suggestion is based on the premise that social cognition is fundamentally different when we are in interaction with others rather than merely observing them. In this article, we outline the theoretical conception of a second-person approach to other minds and review evidence from neuroimaging, psychophysiological studies and related fields to argue for the development of a second-person neuroscience, which will help neuroscience to really go social; this may also be relevant for our understanding of psychiatric disorders construed as disorders of social cognition.

Having a double hat as a teacher of ballroom dances and English (now FLE/S: French as a foreign/second language), I knew of the existence of a transversality, of which I did not know the consistency, between the two disciplines namely body and verbal languages. It was only a few years before retirement, at first with the idea of reversing leisure and profession (since I was teaching dance at the time) to move to Argentina, that I resumed my studies, in French as a foreign/second language.
In Master 1, I meet the paradigm of enaction and performance that is a real click for me and I feel "allowed" to experience it and live it during my internship of M2. From there, my research questions evolve, and I mainly question the impact that one discipline has on the other and how language learning is facilitated. However, I had to consider my context and the very fast flow of "my" learners; this is how I turn the question back to me to formulate the following question: "How does rhythmic performance influence my work as a FLE/S teacher?".
Through an inductive, ethnographic, qualitative, interpretative, and understanding approach, I manage to build methodological tools that help me highlight the invisible. In the Research/Action that I conducted, seeking to change teaching practices, I was able to find my "in-between". This combination of the two disciplines bringing so much wealth, especially those of cognition embodied by the whole body, to promote the learning-acquisition of language, the major stages of which I hope I have demonstrated.
The result of my research attests to the radical change of my teaching work in the FLE/S class by the approach of the performance enacted and that I can, with confidence and in all safety, rely on it and continue to make it germinate.

Digital technologies are transforming our lives. Friends and loved ones are now only a text, Facebook post or Skype call away. But is " being in touch " the same as intimacy, and is face-to-face communication required for empathy? If " interface " is the site of interaction with a medium or system, does the digital interface facilitate or impede human interactions that lead to empathy, and is it " enactive " in Maturana and Varela's sense, where user and system co-evolve? If so, what are we evolving into? And in the rush to develop the latest technological toys and tools, where is the body in all of this? My paper examines these issues in light of new media and digital subjectivity, psychological and anthropological research on mirroring and empathy, and research in behavioural neuroscience. I link these lines of enquiry with a critical and understudied aspect of social media—the concept of intentionality in light of Ihde's phenomenology of technics. When we interact in new media environments our actions are not only mediated by embodiment, hermeneutic, alterity, and background relations with the interface, our interpretation and communication is mediated by the program we are using, a phenomenon I call programmed intentionality. The critical discourse is not so much if and how digital technologies are changing us, but why it matters.


With thanks from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) for funding this research

The field of interactive music systems (IMSs), beginning in the 1980s, is still relatively young and fast moving. The field of music theory-analysis, during the same period (since 1980), has undergone a major transformation in terms of technological innovations, flexibility, and breadth. The two fields have not really caught up with each other. It will be interesting to see what arises as they do — especially as both fields have become more concerned with the role of the body and embodied cognition. Framed in terms of contrasting epistemological orientations, this essay considers some relevant developments in IMSs, music cognition, and music theory and analysis, leading up to the present.  The most popular approaches to music cognition and to IMS design are rationalist (Ashby 2010), exploiting the ‘correct’ embodiments of music (Godøy 2004, Leman 2007, Paine 2009) based on affordances (Gibson 1977, Kelso 1998). This essay, however, advocates a pragmatist (Ashby 2010) approach inspired by music analysis and exploiting the potential of kinesthetic learning (associative learning). Prompted by a progressive approach to music analysis, theory, perception, and cognition (Dubiel 1999, Mailman 2007), interactive music technology can also be constructive, flexible, and progressive, by exploiting kinesthetic learning from immersion in new and unusual motion-to-sound mappings derived from dynamic formal processes in analysed music. In this way, immersive interactive systems offer an opportunity systematically to learn new associations based on principles theorised in response to analysis. Experience of these systems essentially ‘rewires the brain’, thereby exemplifying what Korsyn (2004) has attributed to Lewin’s (1986, 1987) approach to music perception: the ironist approach, as formulated by Rorty (1989). Thus a pragmatist ironist experimental (PIE) approach is articulated. Rather than committing to any particular ways music is already embodied, this approach acknowledges the flexible nature of embodied musical experience. It forges and uses interactive music technologies continually to redescribe and therefore reform how music is embodied, thereby disembodying to re-embody music, expanding how music is heard, contemplated and experienced.

Shaun Gallagher has actively looked into the possibility that psychopathologies involving “thought insertion” might supply a counterexample to the Cartesian principle according to which one can always recognize one’s own thoughts as one’s own. Animated by a general distrust of a priori demonstrations, Gallagher is convinced that pitting clinical cases against philosophical arguments is a worthwhile endeavor. There is no doubt that, if true, a falsification of the immunity to error through misidentification would entail drastic revisions in how we conceive the boundary between self and other. However, I argue that (1) the idea of unearthing an exception to the Cartesian thesis is, on further reflection, not a realistic prospect and that (2) this casts doubt on the attempt to conjoin first-person phenomenology and third-person cognitive science in the service of philosophical debates.

The English word sympathy comes from the composite
Greek term ( “together” and
“passion”). According to this etymology, sympathy means
“to suffer together” or “‘to feel compassion.” In common
parlance, sympathy always includes positive feelings
toward another.

Secondo uno dei principi basilari della Retorica di Aristotele, i parlanti/ascoltatori non sono utenti esterni al linguaggio, bensì elementi costitutivi del discorso. Grazie a questa intuizione è possibile ripensare il ruolo della soggettività nell’argomentazione, mettendo in discussione la tradizionale distinzione tra argomentazione ad rem e argomentazione ad hominem. La dimensione personale del discorso (espressione che include le tre nozioni che in differenti tradizioni sono state utilizzate per designarla: ethos, argomento ad hominem e persona) non è un fattore di disturbo da neutralizzare ma, al contrario, un elemento vitale dell’argomentazione.
Privilegiando il punto di vista della retorica, lungo un asse di pensiero che da Aristotele e Vico arriva fino a Perelman e alla teoria dell’argomentazione contemporanea, il tema è affrontato dapprima dal punto di vista del parlante, discutendo, dunque, principalmente le problematiche relative alla costruzione di una certa immagine di sé e degli altri. Nella seconda parte, a prevalere è il punto di vista dell’ascoltatore. La questione primaria diviene quella relativa ai diversi modi in cui l’ascoltatore accorda fiducia al suo interlocutore; in breve, il tema generale del consenso.
La posta in gioco è, in ultima analisi, il ruolo della razionalità nella prassi umana, caratterizzata da una costitutiva e ineliminabile incertezza, e il modo in cui tale razionalità va pensata.

Adversus empathicos! Quasi un dialogo in tre scene
(Si tratta di un dialogo sull'empatia, tratto dal numero monografico di "Atque" "Il mito dell'empatia. Prospettive critiche", 25, n.s., 2019, pp. 9-23)

I personaggi sono due, evidente la differenza d’età, in sospeso il sesso (nella fiction tutto è possibile). Il personaggio più anziano si ritiene un outsider, visto che crede nelle potenzialità emancipative della rete ma diffida profondamente dei social network (si chiamerà semplicemente out). Quello più giovane è ritenuto un influencer filosofico a motivo del suo fortunato blog “philosophical flashes” (si chiamerà ovviamente in). La scena del loro occasionale dialogo è il drink a corredo della presentazione di un libro. Ma questo non importa un gran che. Anche se 
contesti non sono mai indifferenti alla vita dei significati. In ogni caso stiamo a sentire. I convenevoli d’occasione sono già avvenuti. Come sempre, in dialoghi d’occasione si sa dove si comincia e non si sa come si finisce.

This paper will emphasize a series of negotiation and renegotiation strategies for the corporeal-cognitive relationship between the actor and the spectator in contemporary experimental theatre. To this end, I have chosen two performances with totally different narrative and performative structures (a verbal one and a nonverbal one, both staged by the same director, Eugen Jebeleanu and his team Compagnie 28: Don’t Cry Baby, starting from a play by Catinca Drăgănescu, based on the typologies/situations in Charles Perrault’s Little Red Riding Hood, and Hotel, a free adaptation on F.X. Kroetz’s Wunschkonzert. The paper mixes the descriptive analysis of Jebeleanu’s performances with theoretical and applied perspectives from the fields of cognitive psychology and neurosciences, as well as of semiotics and pragmatics.: The hypothesis we are trying to establish is that experimental shows performed in small spaces combine the corporeal-empathic and the cognitive challenges exerted on the spectator, sometimes turning the experience of the latter into a participatory game that involves an enhancement of one's proprioceptive internal sensations, a stronger perception of one's own being alive and a feeling of participatory attendance.

Dream-enacting behaviors (DEBs) are behavioral expressions of forceful dream images often occurring during sleep-to-wakefulness transitions. We propose that DEBs reflect brain activity underlying social cognition, in particular, motor-affective resonance generated by the mirror neuron system. We developed a Mirror Behavior Questionnaire (MBQ) to assess some dimensions of mirror behaviors and investigated relationships between MBQ scores and DEBs in a large of university undergraduate cohort. MBQ scores were normally distributed and described by a four-factor structure (Empathy/Emotional Contagion, Behavioral Imitation, Sleepiness/Anger Contagion, Motor Skill Imitation). DEB scores correlated positively with MBQ total and factor scores even with social desirability, somnambulism and somniloquy controlled. Emotion-specific DEB items correlated with corresponding emotion-specific MBQ items, especially crying and smiling. Results provide preliminary evidence for cross-state relationships between propensities for dream-enacting and mirror behaviors—especially behaviors involving motor-affective resonance—and our suggestion that motor-affective resonance mediates dream-enactment imagery during sleep and emotional empathy during waking.

Mirror neurons in macaque area F5 fire when an animal performs an action, such as a mouth or limb movement, and also when the animal passively observes an identical or similar action performed by another individual. Brain-imaging studies in humans conducted over the last 20 years have repeatedly attempted to reveal analogous brain regions with mirror properties in humans, with broad and often speculative claims about their functional significance across a range of cognitive domains, from language
to social cognition. Despite such concerted efforts, the likely neural substrates of these mirror regions have remained controversial, and indeed the very existence of a distinct subcategory of human neurons with mirroring properties has been questioned. Here we used activation likelihood estimation (ALE), to provide a quantitative index of the consistency of patterns of fMRI activity measured in human studies of action observation and action execution. From an initial sample of more than 300 published works, data from 125 papers met our strict inclusion and exclusion criteria. The analysis revealed 14 separate clusters in
which activation has been consistently attributed to brain regions with mirror properties, encompassing 9 different Brodmann areas. These clusters were located in areas purported to show mirroring properties in the macaque, such as the inferior parietal lobule, inferior frontal gyrus and the adjacent ventral premotor cortex, but surprisingly also in regions such as the primary visual cortex, cerebellum and parts of the limbic system. Our findings suggest a core network of human brain regions that possess mirror
properties associated with action observation and execution, with additional areas recruited during tasks that engage non-motor functions, such as auditory, somatosensory and affective components.

Dream-enacting behaviors (DEBs) are behavioral expressions of forceful dream images often occurring during sleep-to-wakefulness transitions. We propose that DEBs reflect brain activity underlying social cognition, in particular, motor-affective resonance generated by the mirror neuron system. We developed a Mirror Behavior Questionnaire (MBQ) to assess some dimensions of mirror behaviors and investigated relationships between MBQ scores and DEBs in a large of university undergraduate cohort. MBQ scores were normally distributed and described by a four-factor structure (Empathy/Emotional Contagion, Behavioral Imitation, Sleepiness/Anger Contagion, Motor Skill Imitation). DEB scores correlated positively with MBQ total and factor scores even with social desirability, somnambulism and somniloquy controlled. Emotion-specific DEB items correlated with corresponding emotion-specific MBQ items, especially crying and smiling. Results provide preliminary evidence for cross-state relationships between propensities for dream-enacting and mirror behaviors—especially behaviors involving motor-affective resonance—and our suggestion that motor-affective resonance mediates dream-enactment imagery during sleep and emotional empathy during waking.