Empathy is physical and unconscious

I had a really amazing and inspiring talk with Shin Shimojo today. His Psychophysics lab at Caltech is doing some ground breaking work on essential aspects of being human. Besides being an extraordinary researcher he's also an artist. His work, exhibited world wide deals with visual perception and illusion. He jokes about neuro-hyper-reality as a way to stimulate our neuro perceptual systems in ways that are more real than reality. A few years ago he recieved a grant to study the neural basis for aesthetics. As part of that project he's been studying the foundations of empathy and has uncovered some interesting facts. He runs this experiment where he asks an experimenter and a subject to point their fingers at each other at close proximity and then measures the micro movements of the two fingers. Alternatively he asks the subject to consciously follow or not follow the experimenter's finger with their own finger. It turns out that when the subject consciously trys NOT to follow the finger their finger infact moves at a micro level in sync with the other finger. After 30 min of consciously following the other finger - the unconscious syncronicity is higher. Based on this study and others he is inclined to believe that empathy is built bottom up. That is- our bodies unconsciously physically mimic each other. So the next logical question is how does that mimicry feel, familiar or novel? Which leads me to another study he did looking at which voice we find the most attractive. It turns out that in his study the voice we find most attractive is our voice transposed to the opposite gender. How self centered of us. What if we are able to design systems to have a deeper more direct expereince of the other? Can being self centered lead us to more empathy?  Keep an eye on Shin, he's likely to dissapear before your eyes.