Becoming Unbound: Empathy

What synesthete Daniel Tammet related — the painful “shattering” of an otherwise pleasant interior experience — reflects what many types of highly sensitive people probably grapple with when young. A seminal study from 1949 offers insight. Children from 3 months to 7 years of age were observed rhythmically rocking themselves or covering their eyes and ears from unwelcome stimuli: odors, sounds, colors, textures, temperatures. Their feelings also appeared to be easily hurt, so that (as the researchers commented), “They were 'sensitive' in both meanings of the word: easily hurt, and easily stimulated.”

The prominence of emotion in the early experience of many exceptional people is striking. Williams recalled harboring “an intense, uncontrollable empathy.” Around someone with a broken leg, for instance, she would feel pain in her own leg. Similarly, she “could feel when people had…emotional pain whether they displayed it or not.” One mother of a prodigy reflects that her son “just felt more from the time he was born. He just had so much emotion and feeling inside of him.” Another mother volunteers that, of her three children, “my autistic child is my most empathetic.” And a young man with autism, now in his 20s, when asked if he sees things differently than others do, responds emphatically “I feel them different.”

Williams even felt a resonance with places. It is possible, she said, “to sense a lingering ‘feel’ to a place just as we might smell a lingering smell on the carpet from a beer-swilling party…or experience the lingering ‘touch print’ of a handshake that has already left a few seconds ago.” As I argue in my new book, Sensitive Soul, it’s quite likely that sensitivity such as this develops in utero and is characteristic of many types of exceptional people: synesthetes, savants, people with autism, prodigies and highly gifted children, and people with psychic abilities. They are all highly sensitive, a trait described in 2002 by psychologist Elaine Aron. As she put it, “Most people walk into a room and perhaps notice the furniture, the people – that’s about it. Highly sensitive persons can be instantly aware, whether they wish it to be or not, of the mood, the friendships and enmities, the freshness or staleness of the air, the personality of the one who arranged the flowers." She adds that they are “unusually empathetic,” feeling their own feelings and paying heed to others’ intensively.

This, I propose, is the default setting of human beings. We are all born with the effortless capacity to sense – and to identify or resonate with – everything that comes into our orbit. Gradually, as the brain matures through infancy and childhood, this fluid and multi-modal way of perceiving is superseded. Synesthesia offers a useful example. It’s been suggested that everyone is a born synesthete – that we come into the world with overlapping senses and learn to differentiate them in response to the cognitive logjam we experience as babies. Indeed, the number of connections between neurons – and between different brain regions – are typically ‘pruned’ as a child grows. If that process of cognitive maturation is impaired, the theory goes, a person will remain synesthetic.

The same, I suspect, is true of other extraordinary people. They will retain access to a more primitive state of perception – preconscious and independent of directed thought or judgment. Their thinner boundaries will allow them to empathize intensively, to ‘merge’ into something or someone else, and to gather perceptions (as Williams did) that the rest of us take to be anomalous or paranormal. She described the loss of body boundaries this way: “Suddenly, there is no you and what had been you just becomes … like a sponge through which this sensing or resonance is taken in … There is no thought and no reflection, no wonder and no curiosity. There is just a journey into whatever is being sensed.” Since Tony Cicoria’s out-of-body situation was much different – he realized he was thinking and feeling as he normally would – perhaps a person’s experience of thinned boundaries differs according to his/her age and circumstance. Similarly, during LSD "trips," people have described being conscious and willful, just as lucid dreamers seem able to consciously direct their dreams.

I want to be clear in my opinion that not all apparent journeys outside of oneself entail a genuine apprehension of an external object, person, place, or feeling. Factors that likely explain many such reports, perhaps most, include magical thinking (the evocation of what one wants or needs to have happen), pre-existing belief in the paranormal, fantasy proneness (a tendency for one to experience what is imagined or remembered “as real as real,” chronic childhood abuse (which has been shown to condition all of these), discomfort with ambiguity (the term used to describe people who jump to a conclusion because they’re made anxious by too many variables), and simply erroneous judgment (mistaking correlation for cause, for example).

I strongly suspect, however, that certain people – thin boundary types whose mirror senses go far beyond our typical notion of empathy – are gathering impressions genuinely outside of themselves. Theirs is an instinctual system of sensing, a throwback to capacities we all might have had once upon a time.