empathy
-
Fish May Feel Each Other’s Fear Through the Same Mechanism That Drives Human Empathy
You may have heard that ‘fish don’t feel pain.’ It’s a common, persistent myth that dates back to 17th-century French philosophy. Yet, regardless of René Descartes’s many other worthwhile ideas, the scientific consensus is that he was flat-out wrong on this one. Fish, and all other classes of vertebrate animals, seem to suffer from bumps,…
-
Why Does Music Make Us Feel Things?
Once a day, at least, I’ll tear up listening to music. Just a drop or two, or not even a drop, just a pre-cry convulsion, a sudden seizure of feeling. More often than not, I have no specific memories tied to the song in question — sometimes I’m hearing it for the first or second…
-
Humans Will Lie To Spare A Robot’s ‘Feelings’
Why would they give it lips? Apparently, in order to make a robot as expressive as possible, researchers decided to give BERT2, a robot assistant, a pouty pair of lips and wide eyes with… are those eyebrows? Researchers from the University College London and the University of Bristol, who dared to use BERT2 here to…
-
Meanwhile In The Future: We’ve Invented An Empathy Machine
When you were a kid and stole your friends’ toys, your parent probably asked you this angry hypothetical: “How do you think that made them feel?” But what if you actually could feel what another person is feeling? This week, we travel to a future where humans have invented an empathy machine.