Acquired hyper-empathy (or a surgical treatment for low empathy?)

This is an interesting Wired article (link to the full study) about a woman who had part of her temporal lobe removed as part of a treatment for epilepsy and after acquired what her doctors described as a "hyper-empathy":

The researchers are careful to make some distinctions – they say there are two forms of understanding other people’s mental states (an ability known as Theory of Mind): a cognitive variety, which allows us to represent the beliefs and intentions of others; and an affective variety, which allows us to represent their feelings and emotions. They further explain that empathy is separate from Theory of Mind and is about feeling other people’s emotions. The finding from their tests is that Susan has heightened “Affective Theory of Mind” – that is, an enhanced ability to recognize the feelings and emotions of others; and heightened empathy, in the form of an intense response to other people’s emotions.

The tests

The researchers arrived at these conclusions after subjecting Susan to various neuropsychological tests. One of these tapped her Affective Theory of Mind by asking her to rate her agreement with statements like “I am good at predicting how someone will feel”; another tapped her empathy levels by asking her to rate statements like “I get upset if I see people suffering on news programmes”. More objective was use of a French version of the Reading The Mind in The Eyes Test, which involves identifying a person’s current emotions purely from looking at their eyes. Susan excelled at this test compared with ten healthy control women. The researchers also tested Susan’s Cognitive Theory of Mind using a false-belief task. This takes the form of short stories and the test-taker must deduce which character knew what in each scenario. On this, Susan performed no better than controls.

Richard-Mornas and his colleagues conclude that theirs is a “fascinating case of a patient with a hyper empathy associated with exceptional performance in a task of affective theory of mind after right amygdalohippocampectomy [that is, partial removal of the amygadala and hippocampus]”. They note that the regions where brain matter was removed are part of a neural network, together with the prefrontal cortex, that is involved in understanding other people’s minds and feelings. “The present case report suggests that a new permanent cortical organization of attention and emotion processes has developed in our patient that may be responsible for an enhancement of affective theory of mind,” they said.

The article goes on to suggest reasons to be partially or even highly skeptical about the woman's largely self-reported and unverified claims. The author's main argument seems to be yes, it is possible this happened, but we can't be sure it happened to this woman in this way to the extent she says.

But I kind of want to believe it because I started doing a little neurofeedback this summer (I'll try to write more on this when I get a chance), and a large part of the treatment was focusing on stimulating the temporal lobe to get me more up to speed on things like being connected with my feelings and empathy for others. And at least during certain times of the treatment, I did feel an unusual degree of affection and love for the my loved ones -- extremely high for me certainly, and probably high for anyone, give their reactions to my feelings? Or maybe they were just surprised that such expressions of love were coming from me. :)