parallel said:
obyvatel said:
The way the study was structured, the findings could simply be indicative of competition for attentional resources and speed at which the brain can change gears since the problem solving task and the so-called test of "empathic thinking" were not related in any way .
The article says that both the empathic and analytical testing was done with writing and video problems and does not go into much detai. It read to me like it was taking an isolated view on specific circuits (perhaps comparable to left/right brain hemisphere analogy). Which could be in direct attention resource competition in a specific level (low or unidimensional perspective), but doesn't seem to consider empathy nor analysis in a wider regard such as a concert between the triune parts, mirror neurons etc.
This is a description of the study
[quote author=medicalnewstoday]
For their study, Jack and colleagues recruited 45 healthy volunteers, all college students.
The participants each spent 10 minutes at a time inside a fMRI brain scanner while a screen in front of them presented them with random selections of 20 written and 20 video problems where they had to think about how other people might feel, and another random selection of 20 written and 20 video problems where they had to use knowledge of physics to solve.
After reading a written problem or viewing a video one, each participant then had to give a yes or no answer to a question within 7 seconds.
During each session in the scanner, the participants also underwent rest periods lasting 27 seconds, and there were also various timed delays between each test, some lasting 1 second, others lasting 3 or 5 seconds. During the rest breaks the participants were asked to relax and look at a red cross on the screen.
When they examined the results of the fMRI brain scans, the researchers found that when the participants were presented with social problems, the brain regions associated with analytical thinking were deactivated and the regions associated with empathy and social thinking were active.
And this was also the same the other way around: when presented with physics questions, the analytic regions were active and the empathy regions were inactivated.
These findings were the same for written and video versions of problems.
But when the participants were in the resting state, that is not challenged to solve any problems, the activity cycled naturally between the two networks.
"This tells us that it's the structure of the adult brain that is driving this, that it's a physiological constraint on cognition," says Jack.
[/quote]
One does not need to be socially aware to solve physics problems - so the fact that the social circuits were not engaged in this situation does not sound surprising.
Regarding empathy, in the article, it says that the study shows that the default mode network (DMN) of the brain is used to focus on the external stimuli and relates to "social problems". The DMN which is active when one is not particularly focused on some exacting mental task does have areas in common with the brain circuits which deal with social cognition. (http://www.brainmap.org/pubs/MarsFHN12.pdf). Social cognition however is not the same as empathy. Daniel Goleman in his book "Social Intelligence" (discussed
here ) says that social cognition is only one component of social intelligence. Also the social brain network is quite fluid and distributed most likely involving the primary emotional systems like CARE identified by
affective neuroscience .
Besides the sample size (45) as well as the general ability of participants (college students) to feel empathy need to be factored in before drawing conclusions like analytic thinking and empathy are constrained by neural structure of the brain.
[quote author=parallel]
You're right I think, it does carry that conclusion. I wanted to personally comment on the article but couldn't put my finger on this conclusion, which crossed my mind but discarded doing so since I couldn't back up the argument with proper analysis, lacking discipline in formulating own views. The forum
is a living example that analysis can be done with empathic motivation, I'd like to understand or get a better picture of the levels, just moved Dabrowski back into the reading pile -any others in the recommended list that carry clues?
[/quote]
I have found Dabrowski to be very helpful. In addition, the work of Porges (Polyvagal Theory) and Panksepp (Affective Neuroscience) have helped to understand the neural basis of instincts/primary emotions.
fwiw
