People with Brain Damage Leading to Autobiographical Episodic Memory Loss Can Still Empathize with Other's Emotions, Study Shows

Science for a long time has theorized that people cannot sense another person's feelings, intentions, or sarcasms without first recollecting their own personal experiences. A new study conducted by the Rotman Research Institute at the Baycrest Centre for Aging and the Faculty of Health at York University's Department of Psychology has just demonstrated that individuals with brain can actually perceive other people's feelings and intentions, even if they don't have personal memories.

Individuals with severe autobiographical episodic memory loss are not able to remember their own history with reference to events, times, places, and even the emotions they felt during events. The new study has helped to show that people with severe autobiographical episodic memory loss are actually able to understand other people's feelings and intentions, even if they can't remember their own past feelings and responses.

While losing your autobiographical memory can be a strain on one's relationships, the study provides hope that while a person can't really remember their relation to another person, they can still understand the other person's feelings and intentions, which can help to maintain the relationship.

Science has dubbed the ability to be able to recognize another person's feelings, intentions, beliefs, and ability to lie and pretend as "Theory of Mind." "Theory of Mind" says that a person is able to understand another person's mental states as something that causes their behavior. It also says that this ability allows us to predict another person's behavior. "Theory of Mind" is what allows people to interact with each other and sets us apart from other animals. Scientists have believed for some time that people cannot make sense of other people's thoughts without first having functioning episodic memory. However, other scientists have wondered if these abilities can function separately from episodic memory.

The abilities described in "Theory of Mind" take place in the prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex is the front part of the frontal lobe of the brain.

The study was conducted by the senior scientists at Rotman Research Institute, Dr. Shayna Rosenbaum, Dr. Endel Tulving who is an acclaimed scientist on memory, Dr. Donald Stuss who is an expert on frontal lobes, and Dr. Brian Levine who is an expert on autobiographical memory. For the study, the scientists analyzed two individuals reported as K.C. and M.L. who both have limited autonoetic awareness, or a limited ability to remember themselves in previous events and even put themselves in future events. K.C. has brain damage from a motorcycle accident, while M.L. has brain damage from a cycling accident.

The scientists also used 14 healthy candidates for their study. The scientists asked all of 16 of the candidates, including K.C. and M.L., to conduct tests designed to show how perceptive the candidates are to Theory of Mind abilities. The scientists asked the candidates to look at another person's eye area and determine if the person is being deceitful or playful. The candidates were also asked to watch scenes that display a lot of emotions, or listen to audio narratives and then state what the character's emotional states are in the scenes. The purpose of the tests is to demonstrate the candidate's abilities to perceive empathy, deception, sarcasm, and lying in other people.

The scientists found that both K.C. and M.L. did as well on the tests as the healthy candidates. As Dr. Rosenbaum states, the scientists "found that if you're trying to put yourself mentally in someone else's shoes, you don't need to put yourself in your own shoes first." In other words, their research suggests that the ability to perceive another person's feelings and intentions might be more related to semantic memory rather than episodic memory. Semantic memory is the ability to remember and understand general facts about the world and people around you.

The scientists argue that while they have learned that it is not necessary to continue to have normally functioning episodic memory in order to be able to empathize with another person, they still have yet to determine whether or not initially having had episodic memory is what develops these abilities in the first place.

Kelly Connelly, "People with rare type of memory loss still sensitive to others, study shows," Rotman Research Institute and York University.