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Our cat once caught a mouse and then let it go in the house, still alive and running for cover. The cat, of course, had completely lost interest in the mouse, so it fell on me to do something with it. I thought I’d be able to shoo the little fella out the front door intact, but his scurrying around made that difficult. To make a long story short, I ended up inadvertently squashing the little rodent under the wheels of our refrigerator. I felt bad about that, but what are you gonna do?

I’m not the only one with a kind of empathy for mice in distress. A new study points to mice demonstrating empathy for other mice in distress, at least that’s what it says in Message from Mouse to Mouse. NPR also reported on the study in Research Shows Mice Have Feelings, Too. 

Reading and hearing about the study triggered an association with the idea of mirror neurons and the empathy part that I wrote about earlier in Motor Neurons: Learning by Imitating. 

In the recent mouse study, a kind of curious finding emerged. Namely, the mice demonstrated more empathy for mice with whom they were familiar than with relatives or strangers. 

“This is the most striking part to me,” (researcher) Dr. Mogil said, “that simply looking at an animal in one type of pain makes you sensitive to another kind of pain in a different part of your body; that this social manipulation of pain sensitizes the whole pain system.”

The earlier blog article talked about watching the US Open golf tournament, and feeling for golfer Phil Mickelson’s situation.  

But one of the coolest things about mirror neurons in humans is the ability they give us to feel the emotions of others performing an action, to be relatively familiar with the intentions behind their actions. Of such things are empathy made.

But’s it’s also interesting that, though I’ve never laid eyes on Mickelson except on tv, I developed empathy. That might point to the impersonal familiarity television affords us. And that raises questions about entertainment and sports televison as a substitute for contact. But that’s a topic for another day. Besides, it would probably be hard to get tv sets small enough for mice to watch.