In part three of this series I showed how many aspects of a Human mind can be mapped to equivalents in a corporate mind. Before I describe my theory of empathy in detail, I thought it would be fun to mention one particularly relevant data point regarding mental models.
When someone loses a limb, it's quite common for them to continue to have sensations of the missing limb. This is often called a "Phantom limb". Sometimes the phantom limb can even be painful. There are some accounts of people who lose an arm and then complain that their hand is clenched in a way that is causing pain.
In one famous experiment, scientists used a "Mirror box" that provides the patient with a visual illusion of their original arm and hand. Then, when the patient is looking at the fake arm, the doctors unclench the fake hand and the patient's pain goes away.
An explanation of this effect is based on mental models. A mind contains mental models of many things, including all the parts of its body. When a mind receives nerve signals from its arm and hand, it updates its mental model of the arm and hand accordingly. In effect, the mind uses sensory organs to update its mental models.
When a person loses a limb, the mental model of the limb remains. Since it is no longer being updated by sensory inputs from the limb, it will sometimes fade away, but in other cases it continues to survive. If the mental model represents, say, a tightly clenched fist, the mind will tag this as a potentially painful configuration of a hand which in turn causes discomfort to other parts of the mind. Note that I'm assuming that the sensation of pain is a result of tagging the mental model, which does not require any external signals.
A mirror box engages the patient's visual system to update their mind's mental model of the hand. Note once again that no external signals are required, since the visual system is providing a lot of powerful data that is used for the update. Once the mental model of the hand is changed to a more comfortable position, the tagging of "in pain" goes away and thus so does the pain itself.
The key theory here is that the sensation of pain is a direct result of the tagging of a mental model as being "in pain", and there are many ways for a mental model to get tagged. For example:
- the physical arm/hand can send "cell damage" signals to the mind that indicates that the mental model should get tagged with "in pain"
- the mind can recognize that the fingers (in the mental model) are tightly clenched and therefore tag it with "in pain"
Another way to look at things is that everything that we experience, including our emotions, are a result of the state of our mental models. Change our mental models, and we change our perception.
And this, I believe, is the key to understanding how empathy works.
Update #1: here's a link to a video where Derren Brown uses the power of suggestion to induce a mind to update it's mental model in the absence of physical input.
Update #2: here's a link to a video where Derron Brown uses the power of suggestion to "punch" a martial arts student without touching him. It's all about inducing a change in the mind's mental model!
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