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The Social Brain and the Myth of Empathy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 July 2012

Allan Young
Allan Young*
Affiliation:
McGill University E-mail: allan.young@mcgill.ca
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Argument

Neuroscience research has created multiple versions of the human brain. The “social brain” is one version and it is the subject of this paper. Most image-based research in the field of social neuroscience is task-driven: the brain is asked to respond to a cognitive (perceptual) stimulus. The tasks are derived from theories, operational models, and back-stories now circulating in social neuroscience. The social brain comes with a distinctive back-story, an evolutionary history organized around three, interconnected themes: mind-reading, empathy, and the emergence of self-consciousness. This paper focuses on how empathy has been incorporated into the social brain and redefined via parallel research streams, employing a shared, imaging technology. The concluding section describes how these developments can be understood as signaling the emergence of a new version of human nature and the unconscious. My argument is not that empathy in the social brain is a myth, but rather that it is served by a myth consonant with the canons of science.

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Type
Research Article
Information
Science in Context , Volume 25 , Issue 3: The Varieties of Empathy in Science, Art, and History , September 2012 , pp. 401 - 424
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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