Empathizing v. Systemizing

Apparently, there is a recorded instance of identical twins, separated at birth, entering the water backwards and only up to their knees! Why was I thinking of this when I was commuting by the Delhi Metro recently? Approaching a station, the on-board announcement said “… doors will open on the left …” So, the announcer assumes you know that the forward direction of travel is the reference. What will happen, if the twins get on the train and behave as they do on the beach? Their reference may be backwards and the ‘normal’ left is their right! The twins’ system may be exactly anti-podal and might work against empathizing.

Over the past two years or so, for some personal reasons I have been trying to read up on autism. Going beyond Wikipedia – which nowadays serves me as the first stop for reference, for good or bad - I also took help from some other sources including popular biology and neuropsychology books.

The simple and general understanding I have come to is autism is a deficiency in contextualizing and putting oneself in the other’s shoes that leads to inadequately developed interpersonal and social skills. In short, it is the absence of empathy. Empathy goes beyond merely understanding the other’s thinking, especially in conditions of distress. Indeed, empathy is being sensitive to the others’ feelings and requirements. The word autism springs from the Greek root for self and this itself points to the condition of autistic patients’ inability to see others as equivalent to oneself.

Prof. V S Ramachandran’s, an eminent neuropsychologist, take on mirror neurons (the special neurons that fire when one carries out a task as well as when one watches someone else doing the same thing) perhaps gives a firm connection between mirror neurons, or lack thereof, and autism. Autistic people seem to systemize and atomize everything, to the exclusion of empathy. They repose least faith (I don’t mean this in a cognitive sense) in the ability of the context to fill in the gaps.

Buddhism, from what I know, sets much store by empathy. So much so, mirror neurons are even referred to as the Dalai Lama neurons! In fact, one can feel empathy as river rapids in his writings and teachings, and his arguments are also so peppered. So, what we have here are the two polar opposites – the autistic and the Buddhists (not all of them, of course, but only those reaching certain standards of behavior as enjoined by the Buddha himself).

Now it is time for me to come down from the lofty discourse on empathy as understood from brain science and spiritualism to the more mundane things. Except in the extreme cases of autistic people, I think it is safe to say that we are systemizers and empathizers pretty much in equal measure and there may even be a consistent pattern as to when we are one and not the other.

One of my cousins does not need a tear-jerker of a movie to flood the cinema hall or the living room. Merely the sight of the doleful eyes of the heroine will do the trick! But, removing a splinter from her grandchild’s finger is no big deal, no matter how big a fuss the child makes.

I remember how when I was a child, the addresses I wrote on a post card always, after traipsing through the state (typically Madras and Bombay/Maharashtra), the country and, of course, the continent, ended with “The World”. That could have been a childish prank just to irritate my parents or perhaps it was the systemizing me trying to assert itself over the empathizing me! I used to argue “How does the postman know that this is addressed to someone in India, in Asia and in the world?” Such serious stuff and my parents just about tolerated me. I think they had a heavy dose of empathy and could see where I came from. But, soon enough I was not given this task anymore!

I find myself dithering much while drafting official letters: ‘If I don’t put in this detail I don’t know whether he will understand’. Is this the mark of an over empathizer (really trying to get into the other’s shoes) or an over systemizer (express every detail)? This conflict also has a potential to put you in the dock with your seniors in the office. If you explain too much, you hear, “Do you think I am a dimwit?”; or too less, then it is, “Am I God? How am I supposed to know this?”

We can even take up a common daily occurrence, such as commuting on the roads of, in my case, Delhi, to discuss aspects of empathy further. There are three images, each directing the motorists to the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (you see ‘AIIMS’ on all the three boards).


















Note the Hindi scripts, the English – all three are distinct. Going clockwise from top left, we have the Hindi equivalent of AIIMS (the acronym of ‘Akhil Bhartiya Ayurvigyan Sansthan’), transliteration of AIIMS and then ‘Medical’ transliterated into Hindi.

One has to wait in bus stops or travel by public transport to realize that ‘Medical’ is the most common usage for the institute. AIIMS is what the levels of society above the low or lower-middle class use. And, the Hindi acronym for AIIMS is not used by anyone (people have difficulty in expanding the initials!). That is, for the empathizers, it is ‘Medical’; for the systemizers of one level, it is AIIMS; and systemizers of another level (euphemism for linguistic chauvinists) it is the Hindi acronym.

‘Medical’ scores the highest on the empathy scorecard. The above, I find, is the easiest way to stress the idea that with empathy one participates more fully in society and further, an autistic person is so limited in expressing himself. It is well and good to differentiate oneself from the masses but only if you do not care for effectiveness or efficiency in the working of the society as a whole. When you operate in society empathize, but when you want to create an impression in your hoity-toity soiree, wear the hat of a reclusive autistic and systemize.

We understand how disadvantaged an autistic patient could be in his social interactions. There are treatments of all kinds for this condition, coming under the rubrics biochemical, neurosensory, psycho-dynamic, and behavioral, each having a dedicated bunch of proponents and also severe detractors. Let the scientific community go through its own gyrations in the process of checks and balances and come up with the best possible set of actions.

If in the mean time normal people understand intuitively the variety of ways in which empathizing enables societal interactions, then they may contribute to devising sensitive ways to involve autistics. This may create traffic in the other direction – autistic people responding. I think an appropriate metaphor will be rotating the polarizing filter on the camera lens to capture the vivid colors of a rainbow. The autistic’s mental filter is stuck and may have to be loosened, ever so slowly, so that the beauty of social interactions becomes evident to them.

This might be too simplistic a thinking but as an interested layman, I am qualified, if at all, to comment only as a generalist with a bird’s-eye view perspective. But, Prof. Pinker of MIT says, when it comes to matters of brain “specialists cannot be more than laypeople in most of our own disciplines, let alone neighboring ones”. I am not even a neighbor, but because of my interests I place myself in the neighborhood.

Raghuram Ekambaram