Introduction
Part 5 goes into how the capacity to feel with others works inside the brain, and how it bears on our relationships and on what happens in therapy — approached from both neuroscience and bodily sensation.
In Rolfing, the subject is not only bringing posture into order or freeing the body. Growing back the capacity to feel with others — the capacity to connect — matters as much.
Mirror Neurons Fire — Taking Another’s Experience as One’s Own Sensation
Mirror neurons were discovered in the early 1990s by the research group of Giacomo Rizzolatti at the University of Parma in Italy.
The original work observed neural activity involved in movement, using macaque monkeys. During the experiment, with the monkey sitting still, the premotor cortex of its brain activated simply on watching a researcher reach out and take hold of something — a response nobody had expected.
This was an entirely new phenomenon — the brain responding to watching as though the animal had moved itself — and the cells involved came to be called mirror neurons.
Mirror neurons, then, are known as the cells of feeling-with and of imitation: watching another person move activates the motor regions of one’s own brain. Empathy lies somewhere in the process by which this imitation is converted, inside the brain, into shared feeling.
Seen by region, the mirror neuron circuit looks something like this.
The Mirror Neuron Circuit
| Step | Main regions | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Recognising another through sight and hearing | Occipital lobe, temporal lobe | Catching movement, expression, voice |
| 2. Imitating the movement | Inferior frontal gyrus, premotor cortex (the core of the mirror system) | Responding as though reproducing the other’s movement oneself |
| 3. Resonance of affect | Amygdala, limbic system | Emotional meaning gets attached |
| 4. Feeling embodied | Insula | Registered as sensation on one’s own inside |
| 5. Integrative judgement | Middle prefrontal cortex (mPFC) | Carried through to self-regulation, empathy, and choice of action |
Empathy in Three Layers
Empathy is not simply a feeling. It can be taken up as a three-layer model grounded in the structure and development of neural circuitry.
The three-layer model is known as a conceptual model bringing together findings in neuroscience and psychology from Tania Singer, Daniel Goleman and Daniel Siegel, and is now widely used in education, medicine and the helping professions.
On this model, empathy comes in three kinds.
| Kind | What it is | Regions involved |
|---|---|---|
| Affective Empathy | Feeling another’s feeling automatically | Mirror neurons, amygdala, insula |
| Cognitive Empathy | Understanding another’s position and situation | Middle prefrontal cortex (mPFC), parietal lobe |
| Compassionate Empathy | Responding in action to another’s suffering | mPFC, anterior cingulate cortex, vagal system |
Empathy, then, is a process that unfolds in three stages: feeling, understanding, responding. And each involves different regions of the brain.
How, then, is any of this put to use?
How Empathy Is Grown — NLP, Coaching and IPNB Compared
In therapy and in coaching there is always the question of how to connect deeply with a client, with the person in front of you.
NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming), Co-Active coaching and IPNB (Interpersonal Neurobiology) each approach that question from a different side.
The NLP approach: resonance below awareness
NLP builds on rapport — attunement below the level of awareness — and works toward deep trust through bodily, verbal and sensory matching: mirroring, pacing, meeting someone in their VAK channel.
This works mainly through mirror neurons and the matching of visual and auditory channels, and so stimulates affective empathy — the first layer of the model.
The coaching approach: self and other within relationship
Coaching works within a co-creative relationship with the client — a Designed Alliance — listening carefully to feeling, intention and value, and holding both parties as agents in their own right.
Level 2 and Level 3 listening, and putting feeling into words and checking it, activate the work of the mPFC and grow the capacity to hold cognitive empathy and compassionate empathy in balance.
The IPNB approach: safe connection grown from the nervous system
In IPNB, empathy is not a psychological skill but a state of integration across brain and body as a whole.
Through right-hemisphere-to-right-hemisphere resonance, observation of interoception (insula), and the reintegration of feeling and memory, the weight falls on a process that grows all three layers of empathy at the neural level.
Set out as a table:
Three Approaches to Empathy
| Aspect | NLP | Co-Active coaching | IPNB |
|---|---|---|---|
| How empathy is understood | Rapport — attunement below awareness | Relationship grounded in mutual presence and intention | Integration of the flow of energy and information |
| Techniques | Mirroring, pacing, matching VAK | Level 2 and 3 listening, reflection of feeling | Right-to-right resonance, maps of integration, observing interoception |
| Neurophysiological focus | Mirror neurons, visual and auditory coordination | Attunement of the middle prefrontal cortex | Integration across all layers, insula through mPFC |
| Main aim | Building attunement and trust | Holding one’s own agency alongside relationship | Reintegrating the nervous system within a safe relationship |
All of them activate the circuitry of feeling-with
The approaches come at it from different angles, but what they hold in common is this:
- They activate the circuitry of empathy — mirror neurons, insula, middle prefrontal cortex (mPFC)
- They support the recovery of the capacity to feel, and the restoring of the boundary between self and other
- They serve to join bottom-up (bodily sensation) and top-down (cognition)
Brain Evolution and the Widening Social Brain
As we have seen, NLP, coaching and IPNB each offer a method for growing back the capacity to feel with others, from a different angle.
But this capacity did not arise late, out of an accumulation of technique.
Behind the fact that we came to build societies this complex lies another: that the capacity to feel with others was selected for, and strengthened, over the course of evolution.
Empathy, that is, is a survival strategy built into the brain, and the core of social intelligence.
How, then, did our brains evolve, and how did they grow the network of empathy we call the social brain?
What follows looks at human evolution and the changing structure of the brain, and at Dunbar’s Number, which marks a limit to connection.
Brain Evolution Among the Primates
Over the course of evolution the human brain strengthened something beyond cognitive processing: the capacity to connect with others, which is to say sociality.
| Period and species | Brain volume (ml) | Character of sociality |
|---|---|---|
| c. 4.4 million years ago — Ardipithecus | 300–400 | Life in small groups. Non-verbal empathy at the centre |
| c. 1 million years ago — early Homo | c. 930 | Tools, hunting, wider division of roles |
| c. 400,000 years ago — Neanderthals | c. 1450 | Culture, burial, and empathy of a complex kind |
| Modern humans — Homo sapiens | c. 1490 | A leap in creativity, narrative, and moral empathy |
Dunbar’s Number — Is the Network of Empathy Capped at 150?
The evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar showed a correlation between the size of the neocortex and the upper limit of stable relationships, and this came to be called Dunbar’s Number.
| Stage of brain evolution | Stable relationships (approx.) | Comment |
|---|---|---|
| Australopithecines | Around 50 | Empathy centred on contact |
| Homo erectus | Around 100 | Shared activity through tools and fire |
| Modern humans | Around 150 | Social empathy through language and narrative |
That 150 functions as a kind of limit on social networks and in organisations matches this neural ceiling on the capacity for empathy.
Rolfing and the Rehabilitation of Feeling — Reactivating the Circuits of Empathy
In modern life, stress, multitasking and poor posture can leave the circuitry of empathy itself in something like shutdown.
Rolfing, as work that calls that circuitry back through bodily sensation, brings about the following.
How Rolfing Restores Empathy at the Neural Level
| What changes in the body | Corresponding response in the brain | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Rebuilding posture and the relation to gravity; release of fascia | Increased sensory input from pelvic floor, diaphragm, soles of the feet | The capacity to feel one’s own boundary returns |
| Breath, heart rate and gut rhythm settle | The insula activates | Interoception and awareness of the present moment rise |
| Feeling and sensation connect | The mPFC works integratively | Empathy fatigue is prevented, and the boundary between self and other becomes clear |
Through Rolfing, problems such as being worn out by feeling too much with others, or being swallowed by another’s feeling, ease off, and a safe capacity for empathy is recovered.
Conclusion — The Capacity to Feel Is the Capacity to Live
The capacity to connect with others, and not to be swept away by them.
What carries it is our own inner network — the brain as something that resonates.
Mirror neurons, the insula, and the middle prefrontal cortex.
The coordination of these three is exactly the bridge between empathy and the sense of self.
A Rolfing session is an attempt to rebuild that bridge from the body.
Next Time (Part 6)
Part 6 takes up the developmental order from lower brain to higher, and the question of why working from the body reaches the brain — from the sides of Rolfing and of developmental neuroscience.