Neuroscientists Can Tell if You’re a Psychopath

You’re walking down the street, and you see an old woman trip and fall. It’s nasty. The bystander effect doesn’t come in to play here — people all around her are jostling to help. From afar you see the bruise that has formed instantaneously on her temple, swelling larger and larger after her every breath, and you can’t help but wince. The sensations you get from merely witnessing the fall are immediate — shivers are sent up your spine, your mouth goes dry, and your hairs stand on end. As you read this you might even feel the same. This isn’t just sympathising with her, you genuinely feel her pain; this is how your brain empathises with her.

Empathy is just this — the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, and to fully understand what someone else might be feeling. Within neuroscience, empathy hadn’t been researched for a long time — such an abstract concept seems hard to define at a neural level. However, at the Social Brain Lab in Amsterdam, Christian Keysers and Valeria Gazzola have been attempting to integrate empathy into Cognitive Neuroscience.

Before conceptualising empathy within the brain, Keysers dedicated much of his work to the study of mirror neurons. These neurons have been found in electrophysiological studies in Macaques. For example they fire both when the monkey grabs a cup and when they see someone else grab a…