A Korea drama, 'Reply 1997' reminded many people of their memories in 1990s, because people empathized on drama story.

Empathy : The ability to share another person's feelings and emotions as if they were your own.

Everyone has an experience to feel someone's emotions. If something good and bad happens to my friend or someone complains of an injustice, it feels as if I experienced those things. Like this, humans can live with indirect experiences that would be achieved through empathy without experiencing them directly. Have you ever wondered how empathy can be formed?

In 1996, Giacomo Rizzolatti and his research team conducted an interesting experiment in Italy. Placing the nuts on a tray, the researchers compared the reaction in a monkey’s brain when it picked nuts up itself to the brain activity as it watched a man picking up a nut. Consequently, two stimulations had a same neuron and this is called as 'a mirror neuron'. After that, an American neurologist, Marco Lacoboni announced that our brains have a mirror neuron which makes people understand other's feelings and share emotions. As you can see from this test, humans respond as if they experience that work directly through indirect experience and this is scientific meaning of empathy.

Empathizing starts from the moment of reading joy, despair, pain, and excitement through another person's face and behavior. Empathizing is based on right communication and necessary social ability when we survive in society. Because of this, the power of empathy grows bigger as society changes.

To obtain empathy from many people, good storytelling is needed. There are many successful examples around us. I hope you rethink the power of empathy through future examples.

Jeong Won-kyeong  msjwk9497@naver.com

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