Brain and Creativity Institute, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089-2520, USA.
Cereb Cortex. 2012 Apr;22(4):811-9. doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhr139. Epub 2011 Jul 6.
How do we understand and empathize with individuals whose bodies are drastically different from our own? We investigated the neural processes by which an individual with a radically different body, a congenital amputee who is born without limbs, engages her own sensory-motor representations as a means to understand other people's body actions or emotional states. Our results support the prediction that when the goal of the action is possible for the observer, one's own motor regions are involved in processing action observation, just as when individuals viewed those similar to themselves. However, when the observed actions are not possible, mentalizing mechanisms, relying on a different set of neural structures, are additionally recruited to process the actions. Furthermore, our results indicate that when individuals view others experiencing pain in body parts that they have, the insula and somatosensory cortices are activated, consistent with previous reports. However, when an individual views others experiencing pain in body parts that she does not have, the insula and secondary somatosensory cortices are still active, but the primary somatosensory cortices are not. These results provide a novel understanding for how we understand and empathize with individuals who drastically differ from the self.
我们如何理解和共情那些身体与我们自己截然不同的个体？我们研究了个体通过自身感觉运动的表现来理解他人身体动作或情绪状态的神经过程，这些个体的身体有着显著的差异，比如天生没有四肢的上肢截肢者。我们的研究结果支持了这样一种预测，即当观察者的目标是可能的时，自身的运动区域会参与到动作观察的处理中，就像个体观察与自己相似的人时一样。然而，当观察到的动作不可能实现时，思维机制会利用一组不同的神经结构来处理动作。此外，我们的研究结果表明，当个体看到他人在自己拥有的身体部位感受到疼痛时，脑岛和躯体感觉皮层会被激活，这与之前的报告一致。然而，当个体看到他人在自己没有的身体部位感受到疼痛时，脑岛和次级躯体感觉皮层仍然活跃，但初级躯体感觉皮层不活跃。这些结果为我们如何理解和共情与自己有很大差异的个体提供了新的认识。
