Empathy and Art

Empathy is the ability of “putting yourself in someone else’s shoes,” of feeling another person experiences in a given situation. For example, if you are in the kitchen with someone who is working and that person accidentally cuts their finger with a knife, you don’t need anyone to tell you how they feel in that moment—you already know. And if that person is close to you, you will definitely not only know it in an abstract sense, as mere information, but you will fell pain in yourself, sometimes even in the same place where the injury occurred. You will feel this due to empathy.

The ability to be empathetic is not a luxury; it is a necessary condition for understanding and helping others when they need it most. A mother knows this very well; otherwise, she wouldn’t be able to take care of her baby. Psychologists have tried to understand how is empathy  possible and what mechanisms allow us to acquire this ability. Certainly, the process of socialization and attachment within relationships play a role, but it seems that, above all, there is a neural substrate that enables empathy: mirror neurons.

Mirror neurons are neurons that activate not only when we are performing an action but also when we see others perform the same action. For example, if we want to reach out to grab a lemon from a table, a series of neurons in our motor cortex are activated to trigger a specific pattern of activation and send the “command” to our hand to grab the lemon. Well, some of these neurons also fire in our brain as we simply observe someone else grabbing a lemon from a table, and these neurons have been dubbed “mirror neurons.” It’s as if we recreate in our minds, at a lower intensity, what the other person is doing. And not only what they do but also what they feel, what emotions they have.

This ability to literally, physically experience a part of someone else’s emotions is the foundation of empathy. We care because the other person’s pain actually causes us pain, especially when that other person is significant to us and when the emotions are strong and well expressed. Art has a say in relation to the latter.

Who better than an artist is capable of expressing emotions more intensely and vividly? The artist is the one who infuses emotional substance into the artistic object or performance in a concentration that cannot typically be found in the routine of everyday life. In art, or at least in well-executed art, experiences and emotions are distilled, essentialized.

And for our encounter with art, we need empathy again, an empathy that I would name as “expanded empathy.” Expanded because it is not just about empathy triggered in situations of social “urgency,” but it requires a broader imaginative effort that also engages us intellectually. The demand can be even greater when the art does not come from our own culture or era, or when the artist has a very personal vision of things.

However, such expanded empathy is essential in our development as human beings because it offers us a way to understand not only what we experience but also what we could experience. And that is why it is good to have a bit of art in our lives.

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