The ability to sympathize with those around us seems crucial to our survival, and it's connected to the mirroring functions of the brain.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
It makes you feel good to know that there's other people afflicted like you.
Social connection is such a basic feature of human experience that when we are deprived of it, we suffer.
It's interesting that one of the definitions of the word 'human' is 'sympathetic.' More and more people are beginning to show that they understand why that is important.
Neuroscience has proven that similar areas of the brain are activated both in the person who suffers and in the one who feels empathy. Thus, empathic suffering is a true experience of suffering.
Our human compassion binds us the one to the other - not in pity or patronizingly, but as human beings who have learnt how to turn our common suffering into hope for the future.
It is by a wise economy of nature that those who suffer without change, and whom no one can help, become uninteresting. Yet so it may happen that those who need sympathy the most often attract it the least.
It's true that the human body is more vulnerable than the products of the human mind.
A prerequisite to empathy is simply paying attention to the person in pain.
Most of the time, we make discoveries about how difficult people are at the moment when the difficulties have actually hurt us; therefore, we are not likely to be forgiving or sympathetic.
To be sympathetic without discrimination is so very debilitating.