The Neuroscience of Empathy: How Overlooking this Brain Superpower may Tank your Career

Why Should I Care About Neuroscience?

Brains. Everyone has one. So do you. Do you understand its secrets?

Do you understand your brain’s secrets?

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Neuroscience is frustrating: either obfuscated by jargon or warped into buzzword pseudoscience. While this article’s titular word “superpower” may arouse healthy suspicion, your 3 pound organ processing this article indeed has superpowers.

Most go their entire lives without discovering theirs. That time for you is over. Allow us to explain.

Name another object that independently decides and enacts: moving matter across space, slowing perceived time, releasing acid on demand, and propelling thoughts through the fourth dimension.

The above statements seem absurd. But, when one ponders their own muscular motion, heart rate, intestinal activity, and ability to write and speak – each perfectly aligns. These powers go deeper. There is one superpower many overlook: empathy.

There is one superpower many overlook: empathy.

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Understanding your nervous system’s design will not only propel each and every day at work, but also unlock your human capacity. As you will soon discover, empathy is far crazier than most realize. It is – in fact – life changing.

Though the Shrek movies provide questionable slapstick humor, one scene displays the cartoon ogres blowing air through their ears as trumpets. “I didn’t know we could do that,” retorts the series protagonist of the same race, four movies in.

Us humans are far worse: relegating our gifts…given. Don’t bury your gifts. Your brain is not mundane.

Your brain is not mundane.

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It is time to awaken. No, reading this won’t make you telekinetic nor telepathic – but you will see how we are fundamentally built towards purpose: a system above all machines to enrich lives and fulfill ultimate value. Let’s stop you from tanking this value

How is my Brain Organized?

Before you study your superpower, you must first understand your architecture.

We were not born with an assembly manual. We were, however, assembled. Studying our brain makeup doesn’t require years of textbook upon textbook: here’s a five minute version.

We were not born with an assembly manual.

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Take a sprouting seed, and turn it upside down. Voila. You now have an uncannily similar model of your central nervous system (CNS, for short). The seed represents your brain, which arches down into your spinal cord – the sprouting tree’s “stem” ending right above your butt.

The three branches of this upside-down sprout comprise your peripheral, or remaining, nervous system (PNS).

What parts control my movement and senses?

Bored? Imagine a blade cutting you in half sideways: head to rear. If your entire face is on one half of the cut and your entire butt on the other, you imagined this correctly.

You’ll understand the pain you felt reading that momentarily – but the “face half” of this morbid slice controls your body’s motion. Actions. Verbs. Adverbs. The “butt half” controls your body’s senses: sight, smell, touch, taste, and hearing. Objects. Nouns. Adjectives.

Congratulations! You’ve now learned neuroanatomy fundamentals typically reserved for medical students. You understand what half of your CNS is currently moving your head – the frontal, also called ventral, areas – and the half processing your eyesight – the rear, or dorsal, areas.

Your CNS’s back half codifies senses into objects: nouns. Its front half mobilizes actions: verbs.

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Let’s dig a bit deeper.

What parts control my decision making and base desires?

Put your hand on your forehead. Place your other hand on the tailbone above your butt. Trace an imaginary path between the forehead hand and the butt hand: and you understand the most-to-least developed parts of your central nervous system. Now wash your hands.

Let’s start with your forehead. Right above your eyeball sockets in your forehead is where your brain starts: the prefrontal cortex – the most developed and complex area of your brain. This executive center is responsible for decision making, overriding almost all functionality beneath it.

This alone is a human superpower: our gift of free will. No matter the basal desires – sex, drugs, alcohol, or other nefarious longings – we have the capacity to override these: overcoming every habit and addiction and defining our timeless selves.

Our prefrontal cortex houses our executive superpower: free will.

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Next let’s go to the butt. Above your tailbone is your sacral spinal cord, the end of your central nervous system. This automates your most basal functions: namely pooping, peeing, and reproductive functions. Many are often automated, overridable by executive command.

What do the rest of my brain and spinal cord do?

Believe it or not, you are almost done! Between your base desires – often not good – and your capacity to overcome them is a myriad of specialized functions.

We’ll separate them into your brain and spinal cord, but – most importantly – we’ll go in a directional pattern allowing you to understand your most complex system’s design. No need to get caught up with the jargon introduced, just notice the functions.

Without further adieu: a tour of yourself.

Your Brain’s Cortex

Your brain has several important areas, many which can have their own articles. We’ll do a brief survey in plain English. Let’s have a quick tour of the brain’s surface – represented by the fancy word cortex: a Latin word for bark.

Namely, we’ll explore your brain’s four lobes – like continents – and dig a bit deeper.

Cortex – the brain’s surface – is the Latin word for bark.

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You’re already familiar with your forehead region – the prefrontal lobe. This area extends back to your hairline, covering your brain’s frontal lobe: also responsible for other “action” functions. Learning, critical thinking, personality, attention, and premeditated movement are governed by this complex area extended from your prefrontal lobe.

Touch the top of your head. Remember that morbid mental exercise of being split in half? This parietal lobe marks the beginning of your back half of your brain – controlling sensation and language, an interesting duo we’ll circle back to when explaining your empathy superpower.

Place both hands on the sides of your head, between your ears and temples. These are your temporal lobes by said temples. These parallel flappy-looking areas process your hearing and emotional recognition.

Last but not least, we get into the back of your head. This region is named the occipital lobe: an entire area devoted to eyesight – our most dominant sense.

Your Brain’s Depths

Congratulations, you’ve covered the four main regions of your brain’s outer shell, its cortex. Next, we’ll drill into your little brain. Yes, you have one.

It’s called your cerebellum, and it indeed translates into “little brain”. This cute structure protrudes under the base of your head, and is responsible for your balance.

Next, we start our transition into what will become your spinal cord. Far from the frontal lobe, this area regulates more automatic functionality. Under your cerebellum is an area called the pons. This regulates sleep, among other rhythmic and relay processes.

Below the pons we end at the medulla oblongata. At the top of your neck, this offshoots into what is your spinal cord, automating many involuntary vital processes you don’t have to: blood rate, heart pressure, and breathing. It’s a good thing we don’t control those! 

Congratulations, you’ve officially toured your brain. We left out several areas, but the purpose is to showcase a descending pattern.

To recap: frontal lobe – forehead – executive action; parietal lobe – top – sensation and language; temporal lobe – sides – hearing and recognition; occipital lobe – back – vision; cerebellum – base – balance; pons – core – sleep and relay; and your medulla oblongata – sprout – vitals. The deeper we get, the less control you have.

The deeper into the CNS you get, the less control you have.

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Now we take the final plunge into your neck and back.

Your Spinal Cord

A puppet master cannot control the puppet without strings. Your spinal cord are these strings: the conduits between your brain’s executive power and enacting said power through your body.

Like your brain, your spinal cord has two sides – with the same exact functional duality of your brain: the front, ventral, side branches into the rest of your body to control muscular motion; and the back, dorsal, side collects touch and sensory signals from all your skin and other bodily areas back up to your brain.

Your spinal cord is not just a mere highway with offramps. It also specializes. From head down, you have four major spinal segments: cervical, thoracic, lumbar, and sacral.

Each segment stores contextual memory – the memory of habits: muscle memory. Yes, it actually exists and is physically stored in the bony cage of your spine.

Muscle memory actually exists. It’s local memory physically stored in your spinal cord.

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In example: the cervical, or neck, region of your spinal cord stores the habit of breathing in a group of neurons called a central pattern generator.

On that note, you can breathe a sigh of relief. You now know fundamental neuroanatomy. It’s time to use it!

What do Most Overlook about their Brains?

Touch. Smell. Taste. Hear. See. Think. Speak. Move. Live.

Our brain does a lot. There is, however, one superpower. One capacity strings all these gifts together: empathy. Empathy is the superpower – coordinating all other powers. It is also what you may be ignoring most.

Empathy is not a mere emotion: it is coordination – an orchestration of all we are to impart our lives outward based on a reflection inward. Let’s hearken back to your short brain anatomy lesson.

Empathy is not a mere emotion: it is coordination – an orchestration of the inward outward by life’s Conductor.

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Our back or dorsal regions sense things: input. Like data storage – mental models of objects and their properties are codified in the altars of mind. Our front or ventral regions decide and enact things: output.

Like functions – said mental models direct our actions and influence in the shared realm of time and space. The fundamental building mechanism shaping how input wires to output is informed by empathy.

How does empathy work?

Empathy is mirrored. Babies don’t learn to speak by studying dictionaries. They watch their parents. How, then, did we go from silence to reading and discussing neuroanatomy? We observe. We empathize.

Babies don’t learn to speak by studying dictionaries.

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Empathy is the foundation of all learning: good and bad. Ok. But, how, specifically, does this work? In 1992, scientists at the University of Parma discovered a specialized type of neuron: a mirror neuron.

These were no ordinary motor neurons, which activate and control our movement. Mirror neurons don’t just activate when we move, but when we observe others moving.

What does this mean? Our observations empower our behaviors: literally. Extensive studies have built upon this discovery, finding many of our own mirror neuron clusters lie in the decision-making portions of our brain – the frontal cortex.

Watching any action doesn’t mean you are already mimicking said action: it means you are ready to mimic said action so long as you decide to.

Our observations kickstart our behaviors.

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It reflects in our learning. In our language. That’s why the words, “I’m moved” may come out of our mouths after an inspiring film. In fact, emotion drives motion: the very verbal roots being shared.

How does empathy affect my brain architecture?

Hearkening back to the baby scenario: the infant’s wide eyed stare is far from empty. In fact, CEOs and industry leaders would do well to learn from the infant’s capacity to empathize.

This observation is where we start to understand our use of the word superpower. Our empathy and how we choose to apply it physically reshapes our brains, our behaviors, and our habits.

Our brains are malleable. Neurons, or cellular nodes, make up an intricate network supported by infrastructure cells, called glia. What is fascinating about each neuron is it also follows a similar model of input to output.

Our individual neuron has little sensory tentacles from its head, called dendrites, that build up charge until it fires down a large trunk-like structure, an axon. This has a domino-effect: cascading to other nearby neurons’ dendrites in connections called synapses.

Our brains are malleable.

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Our synapses change. Just as we prune plants; we can prune brain connections through: disuse, bad habits, powerful words we profess or believe, injury, and sleep.

This is literally called synaptic pruning – and is a typically healthy mechanism. Generating new connections is also possible: although much, much harder.

Learning is painful. To learn, we must overcome failure and try again. There are some skills, however, some of us seem to learn more efficiently than others.

This may be due to genetic predispositions at times, but at others – it is likely due to our empathetic superpowers. There is no Matrix kung-fu download button, no golden bullet. There is, however, a silver bullet.

Learning is painful.

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Let’s, again, go back to the baby example. Why do babies gaze at their parents conversing before speaking? This intensive and dedicated value observation gives them this silver bullet: a head start. As they see the muscles around their mother or father’s lips form words, their occipital – back – brain lobe informs their internal mirror neurons to start doing the same.

By the time said babies decide to say “Daddy” after their many odd noises, the resultant “Dadda” is already pre-learned. This applies to walking, dressing, writing, math, social skills, sports, science, teenaging, driving, working, and adulting.

What are the consequences of being blind to empathy?

Be careful what you give your time. This is not only defined as love or value, it reshapes you from the inside out. As you grow older, your brain specializes.

We have around 86 billion neurons, a number that diminishes as we age. More and more synapses prune, based on decisions made and how we spend every waking hour. Our habits yield our strongest connections.

Be careful what you give your time.

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Blindness to empathy is a blindness to self. What we watch, read, hear, eat, smell, and touch has a profoundly imminent impact on our actions. This is both good and bad: everyone is specializing their brain.

One demonstration is peer pressure. A teenager may consistently observe another person cuss, and said foul word seems pre-loaded into their brains without deliberate pruning.

The most relevant example of this is pleasure: a sensory input providing dangerous potential to close our circuits and entrap our minds within loops of time.

Positive habits can healthily be catalyzed by pleasures, but our obsession and fixation on a pleasurable experience without understanding its purpose has the capacity to destroy the brain. Sugar, cocaine, porn, inordinate gaming are all examples of said short-circuiting: entrapping humans in a centrifugal rather than a centripetal, or empathetic, life.

Decisions are so profound to us that they differentiate sex from rape: literally reflected in our executive control of touch. Observing and mirroring other action empowers us to reflect said actions, but we still have the decisive power to restrain – thank God.

Decisions mark the difference between hearing and listening, consuming and absorbing, touching or embracing.

Decisions are so profound they differentiate sex from rape.

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Blindness to empathy physically disables you. When you fail to care for what you fill your mind with, your time physically reflects what you absorb: projecting into habits not only destroying value, but bringing about death.

As all great power comes with great responsibility, this somber note was needed. Now, let’s focus on your great potential.

How do I Apply Empathy at Work and in my Career?

We published another article detailing how value – the foundation of all economies and substance underlying any form of money – is reflexive.

As it turns out, your neural architecture is also reflexive. This, in fact, is the precise venue where value is generated: the spark of generation when the question “Why not?” propels from the lips of someone frustrated on behalf of another.

We are not to love nor indulge in the self. We are to love others as we love ourselves – ironically bringing us the fulfillment of self. This may seem trifling, until we define love.

The ultimate measure of love is to lay down a life for another. Less ultimate measures of demonstrable love – the ultimate form of value – are when any of us humans lay down our own finite time and selves.

The ultimate measure of love is to lay down a life for another.

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From a neuronal to neuroanatomical level, we are wired to receive and transmit: not solely the former nor latter.

Our economy proceeds based on this exchange: its quality measured by how well we sense the pains and processes of those we are often blinded to.

Empathy Can Be Empirical

The word “empathy” triggers subjective associations. Emotions, or transient and variable states of feeling, are impossible to measure without outputs. However, once we accept this and begin to look at people’s outputs: their words and actions, we finally can understand their motivations: what moves them through each day.

This is what strangely brings data value. Without people, data is purposeless. Both quantitative and qualitative data, in a business sense, serve to symbolize meaning.

Said meaning starts with observation. When we solve problems, we tend to be selfish: trailblazing annoyances in our way. However, when we observe said problems are shared – technological innovation is born.

Without people, data is purposeless.

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The horse gives way to the carriage, which gives way to the car. This has both selfish and selfless implications: we are inherently selfish, but few apply said selfishness towards the populace. The problem space, getting from point A to B takes work and time, is shared.

Empathizing with others in a smaller sample, triangulated with a larger parameter, will only help inform the solution space: a vehicle.

Empathy, made accountable, is objective. It translates subject-to-subject neurological exchanges in the problem space into the solution space, and deems what data is even worth collecting.

Empathy Informs Decisions

Every decision comes down to separating what we should do from what we desire to do. As this article has described: empathy may be a superpower, but what you do with it is up to you.

Every decision comes down to separating what we should do from what we desire to do.

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We do not urge you to follow every crowd or take up every cause. In fact, doing this will be destructive. To even make an argument evidences we share a standard of correctness and incorrectness. Discerning what is and isn’t correct isn’t just essential to building your empathy: it is how you are wired.

Our brains don’t enjoy being muddled. We are made to be decisive. Be honest with yourself and say yes, no, or defer to collect evidence rather than straying a middle line. You only are not a link in a societal chain. We are empowered to swim against currents, not submit to them.

“Don’t be so open minded that your brains fall out.” G. K. Chesterton

This quote is neuroscientifically sound. In fact, we are safer deciding not to do most things until we have truly empathized with whether or not we should.

Applying Empathy to Work

This is what value or user experience (UX) research provides for product teams in companies. We see and feel and walk through the actions of others before and after using a product.

Does said product even objectify any net increase in value? If not, how can your team increase it?

Does said product even objectify any net increase in value?

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Companies exist to create value: captured not in vacuum, but in your brain. Watching videos of people describing their roles, their daily routines, their pains and gains.

Empathize. Pattern these observations across participants, and triangulate with quantitative data. Share your findings with a team, and ideate solutions.

Then test said solutions, from lower to higher fidelity, with the same people. You’ve just generated value. Time to sell it.

The possibilities are endless. They all start both outside and inside your brain.