BRAIN CAN FEEL OTHER PEOPLE’S PAIN: STUDY

SOME PEOPLE ACTUALLY FEEL OTHERS' PAIN
WHEN WITNESS ANOTHER PERSON BEING HURT

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - A brain-imaging study suggests that some people have true physical reactions to others' injuries. The new study claims that people who feel empathetic towards others' misery actually have elevated activity in the pain-sensing brain regions when they see someone hurt. Using an imaging technique called functional MRI, UK researchers found evidence that observing someone else in pain or witnessing another person being hurt, produces a shared emotional experience that activates brain areas processing the emotional component of pain. Functional MRI monitors changes in brain blood flow, allowing researchers to see which brain areas become more active in response to a particular stimulus. To find out how the brain reacts while seeing others in pain, researchers made 108 college students view several images of painful situations - including athletes suffering sports injuries and patients receiving an injection. Close to one-third of the students said that, for at least one image, they not only had an emotional reaction, but also fleetingly felt pain in the same site as the injury in the image. The researchers took functional MRI scans of 10 of these responders, along with 10 non-responders who reported no pain while viewing the images. It was found that while viewing the painful images, both responders and non-responders showed activity in the emotional centres of the brain. But responders showed greater activity in pain-related brain regions compared with non-responders, and as compared with their own brain responses to emotional or neutral images. This confirms that some people have an actual physiological reaction when observing others being injured or expressing pain.

The responders also tended to avoid horror movies and disturbing news images so as to avoid being in pain – which is more than just an empathetic response for them. Findings of the study published in the journal Pain could offer a better understanding of the mechanisms and potential treatments of such cases of unexplained ‘functional’ pain. "Patients with functional pain experience pain in the absence of an obvious disease or injury to explain their pain," explained Dr. Stuart W. G. Derbyshire of the University of Birmingham, one of the researchers on the new study.

WHAT DO THE VEDIC TEACHINGS TELL US?

Everyone should be unhappy to see others in distress and happy to see others happy. Ātmavat sarva-bhūteshu: one should feel the happiness and distress of others as his own. One should be happy to see others happy, and one should be unhappy to see others unhappy. This is the principle to be followed. … A Vaishnava, therefore, is truly a perfect person because he laments seeing others unhappy and feels joy at seeing others happy. A Vaishnava is para-duhkha-duhkhī; he is always unhappy to see the conditioned souls in an unhappy state of materialism. Therefore a Vaishnava is always busy preaching Krishna consciousness throughout the world.

Śrīla A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupāda :
“The Śrīmad Bhāgavatam”
Purport in Canto 6 - Chapter 10 - Verse 9.