• DOI:10.1353/nar.2006.0015
• Corpus ID: 52228354

A Theory of Narrative Empathy

@article{Keen2006ATO,
  title={A Theory of Narrative Empathy},
  author={Suzanne Keen},
  journal={Narrative},
  year={2006},
  volume={14},
  pages={207 - 236}
}

• Suzanne Keen
• Published 9 August 2006
• Art
• Narrative

We are living in a time when the activation of mirror neurons in the brains of onlookers can be recorded as they witness another’s actions and emotional reactions. 1 Contemporary neuroscience has brought us much closer to an understanding of the neural basis for human mind reading and emotion sharing abilities—the mechanisms underlying empathy. The activation of onlookers’ mirror neurons by a coach’s demonstration of technique or an internal visualization of proper form and by representations in television, film, visual art, and pornography has already been recorded. 2 Simply hearing a description of an absent other’s actions lights up mirror neuron areas during fMRI imaging of the human brain. 3 The possibility that novel reading stimulates mirror neurons’ activation can now, as never before, undergo neuroscientific investigation. Neuroscientists have already declared that people scoring high on empathy tests have especially busy mirror neuron systems in their brains. 4 Fiction writers are likely to be among these high empathy individuals. For the first time we might investigate whether human differences in mirror neuron activity can be altered by exposure to art, to teaching, to literature. This newly enabled capacity to study empathy at the cellular level encourages speculation about human empathy’s positive consequences. These speculations are not new, as any student of eighteenth-century moral sentimentalism will affirm, but they dovetail with efforts on the part of contemporary virtue ethicists, political philosophers, educators, theologians, librarians, and interested parties such as authors and publishers to connect the experience of empathy, including its literary