Animals are capable of emphaty. Substantiate this statement with examples from the story as well as your own experiences.Give answer in 100 -150 words.
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Microscopic study of the human brain has revealed neural structures, enhanced wiring, and forms of connectivity among nerve cells not found in any animal, challenging the view that the human brain is simply an enlarged chimpanzee brain. On the other hand, cognitive studies have found animals to have abilities once thought unique to the human. This suggests a disparity between brain and mind. The suggestion is misleading. Cognitive research has not kept pace with neural research. Neural findings are based on microscopic study of the brain and are primarily cellular. Because cognition cannot be studied microscopically, we need to refine the study of cognition by using a different approach. In examining claims of similarity between animals and humans, one must ask: What are the dissimilarities? This approach prevents confusing similarity with equivalence. We follow this approach in examining eight cognitive cases—teaching, short-term memory, causal reasoning, planning, deception, transitive inference, theory of mind, and language—and find, in all cases, that similarities between animal and human abilities are small, dissimilarities large. There is no disparity between brain and mind.
Keywords: animal/human, Darwin
Charles Darwin held that humans were essentially “big-brained apes” (1). Neuroscientists concurred with Darwin until well into the 1980s, arguing for what they called the “basic uniformity” of the mammalian brain. Not until the 1990s when, aided by new histological techniques, neuroscientists turned to the microscopic study of the human brain did this simple picture change. In 1999, Preuss and Coleman (2) became the first to show microscopic differences in brain organization between apes and humans. In one layer of the human primary visual cortex, nerve cells were organized in a complex meshlike pattern very different from the simpler vertical arrays of cells in other primates. At about the same time, Hof and associates (3) rediscovered a slender tapered neuron, labeled VEN, in both human and ape. Humans, however, have many more VENs than apes; individual VENs are markedly larger; and those in the human are located in only two parts of the brain: the anterior cingulate cortex and the frontoinsular cortex (4). Both of these structures appear to be involved in complex social emotion/cognition such as empathy, feelings of guilt, and embarrassment.
The human reorganization of the brain affected even the minicolumn—80–100 neurons bundled vertically that supports parallel processing—which is the basic unit of information processing in all mammalian brains. Human minicolumns in the left planum temporale, an area involved in language and perhaps music, are organized differently than those of chimpanzees and rhesus monkeys (5). They are far wider, an average of 51 μm compared with 36 μm in the chimpanzees and monkeys. The increase is due to an enlarged neuropil space, which contains the axons, dendrites, and synapses that make neural connections (5, 6).
What causes synapses between neurons to form? Barres and associates (7) found, in answering this question, that specialized neuroglial cells called astrocytes (which make up nearly half the cells in the human brain) must be present for synapses to form; these cells secrete a protein called thrombospondin that triggers synapse formation (8). Preuss and associates (9) then found that human brains produce up to six times as much thrombospondin messenger RNA than do either chimps or macaques. Moreover, the areas found to have enhanced thrombospondin expression have larger neuropil space and thus more room for synaptic connections.
Virtually all the newly discovered human singularities are located in areas associated with either complex social cognition [theory of mind (TOM)] or language. But the reorganization of the human brain has not been without cost. In addition to advancing language and TOM, it brought about neurodegenerative disease: schizophrenia, autism, Alzheimer's, etc. These diseases are as unique to humans as is advanced cognitive function. What cognitive functions make humans susceptible to dementia? Are factors that help humans adjust swiftly to rapidly changing social situations a possibility? A major goal of neuroscience is to find a unified theory that will explain both the positive and negative sides of the reorganization of the brain.
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