Why you’re probably a secret empath, explained by a neuroscientist

There is a scene in Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol 2, the Marvel movie released in 2017, where the character of Mantis – an alien played by Pom Klementieff – touches Chris Pratt’s Peter Quill on the hand. “You feel love!” she tells him, her face beaming.

“I guess, yeah,” he replies, nervously. “I feel a general, unselfish love for just about everybody…”

“No! Romantic, sexual love,” she says, before pointing a finger at Quill’s teammate, Zoe Saldana’s Gamora. “For her!”

Some superheroes have super strength. Others fly. Mantis’s superpower is a souped-up version of empathy, meaning that she can touch someone and feel their emotions as though they were her own. Yet according to neuroscientist Dr Dean Burnett, author of new book Emotional Ignorance, this isn’t quite as fantastical as it sounds. In fact, it’s merely an extreme version of something we already do.

How humans evolved to have empathy

“Humans have evolved – primates as well – with mirror neurons that react when you see someone doing something, not when you do it,” Burnett explains.

“We have evolved the ability to see other people’s actions – their physical characteristics, their movements – and our brains have an elaborate system that’s fed into the planning part of the brain that goes, ‘Right, so they did this. If I did that as well, I would be able to learn this skill.’ It’s how we learn by observation, and that’s a really complex, evolved system, which connects the motor cortex, the mind map, the body map, the other regions, and our actions.”

But at some point in our evolution, says Burnett, this network became fundamentally connected to the granular part of the insular cortex, which is a big part of the emotion system.

“So now, whenever someone is feeling emotion, someone else has loads of different cues: the colour of their face, their expression, their stance, their posture – all of that is a big part of an emotional expression. By linking that to our emotional system, our brain recognises that someone is angry or overjoyed and that leaks into our emotional system. Therefore we see someone else’s emotional state, and feel it ourselves.”

Burnett is sceptical, however, about the idea of real-life Mantis-style empaths, who tend to claim that they have a greater empathic sensitivity than others.

“I don’t know of any variant of human who has a special ability in this area,” he says. “People can call themselves an empath, but it’s not a recognised scientific title. Plus, it seems pretty egotistical. Everyone has empathy, to a degree, even psychopaths – they can recognise other people’s emotional state and manipulate it.”

Unsurprisingly, empathy tends to be stronger for people you care about in some way. This, of course, can lead to disturbing consequences, particularly when it comes to empathy for “ingroups and outgroups”, as Burnett puts it – essentially, people you identify with (ingroups) compared to those you find it harder to relate to (outgroups). But there’s also an evolutionary advantage to curbing our empathetic abilities – especially before it can reach the levels of Mantis, who feels other people’s emotions so strongly she can become overwhelmed by them.

“As a tribe, as a social species, we wouldn’t be able to function,” says Burnett. “In the olden days, on the African savannah, if you saw someone break their leg and roll around in agony, you’d say, ‘Oh, God, that looks awful’ and feel bad for them. But if you felt that exact same pain yourself, you’d be incapacitated. It would mean that, while running from a predator, if it took out one of you, then suddenly it’s got all of you.

"Empathy has to be a reflection of an emotional state, not the actual thing.”

In short, we all feel empathy, so Mantis’s skills aren’t that outlandish. But luckily for us, we don’t tend to feel overwhelmed by others’ emotions, like she does.