Free The ALL NEW Don't Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate by George Lakoff

physical cues that broadcast emotion in others will usually trigger in an observer the same brain response that would accompany those physical cues of the same emotion in ourselves. That is why we can usually tell if someone else is happy or sad, or angry or bored—and why a smile is often unconsciously greeted with a smile or a yawn with a yawn.
    All this is thanks to the mirror neuron system, which has circuitry connecting the brain’s action centers and perception centers. As a consequence, what you see others doing is neurally paired with brain activity that could control your own actions. Muscles are activated by firing neurons, and many of the same neurons are firing whether you are performing an action or whether you are seeing someone else performing the same action. This “mirroring” allows you to see the musculature tied to the emotions of others and sense in your brain what the same musculature would be like in your body, and hence the same emotions, in yourself. In short, it allows you to feel the emotions of others! That is what empathy is about.
    But this effect has further repercussions in the brain. Neuroscientists have discovered a brain overlap, too, between imagining and doing. Many of the same neural regions are activated when we form mental images as when we actually see. The same holds true for whether we imagine moving or are actually moving. That means that we have the capacity to empathize not only with someone present, but also with someone we can imagine, remember, read about, dream about, and so on. That is why we can be deeply moved by a novel or a movie, or even a newspaper story.
    Neuroscientists have also shown that, when someone is in love and they see their loved one in pain, the pain center in their own brain is activated. Emotional pain is real.
    Sounds simple, but there are some twists to the story, some neural complications that affect how we ultimately respond to what we see, hear, and imagine. The prefrontal cortex has regions particularly active during the exercise of judgment. These regions contain neurons that are active when we are performing some particular action and less active when we see someone else performing the same action. It is hypothesized that this gives us the capacity to modulate our empathy—to lessen it or turn it off in certain cases. The mirror neuron system thus connects us emotionally to others, but can in certain cases also distance us emotionally from others.
    The prefrontal cortex is active in another neural system, too—one that I’ll call the well-being/ill-being system. This is the system that releases certain hormones in your brain when you have experiences that make you feel good, and releases others when experiences make you feel bad. In essence, this system regulates whether you have a sense of well-being or ill-being at any given time. It is also the system that presumably is involved in making judgments on the basis of your imagination of what will or won’t bring you well-being.
    The well-being system and the empathy system can interact in complex ways. Some people feel satisfaction both when they are personally satisfied and when those they empathize with feel a sense of well-being.
    Other people do not have the two systems connected in that way. (1) They may have the well-being system overriding the empathy system—with their interests overriding the cares and interests of others. Or (2) they can have a complex interaction in which they maintain their own well-being and balance it with contributing to the well-being of others. Or (3) they may be self-sacrificing, always placing the well-being of others ahead of their own well-being. Or (4) they may be part of an in-group, and may place their well-being and that of in-group members first, without empathizing at all with out-group members. This can vary, depending on what counts as a given person’s in-group.
    Since morality is about well-being, your own and that of others, these four