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RE: Adventures in Cognitive Science 3: Mirror Neurons – Towards understanding Others
Hmmmmm, I have a lot of understanding of other people's actions and am considered to be very talented in certain aspects. I, however, lack a great deal of empathy. Am I autistic? :O Lol, let's leave that to future neuroscientists.
Thank you for another great post. <3 I wish you had more popularity. You're really lacking in views and votes.
The interesting thing about the word "empathy" is that its original meaning comes from the German word "Einfühlung" (feeling-into), which was translated into ancient Greek and translated again (or actually more being adapted) to English. Along this way a lot of additional meanings were put into this word (to paraphrase a professor of mine), the biggest one probably being "understanding". Which is kind of ironic, since one of the inventors of this term, Robert Vischer, distinguished between "feeling-into" and "understanding". It is worth noticing that he was also an art historian and I guess that influenced this distinction. Before I'm losing track here, mirror neurons seem to be a necessary condition for empathy, but they seem to be mostly involved when seeing empathy as "understanding" and not empathy as "feeling-into".
And thank you very much for your kind words :)