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Telepathy and emotions question

Joanna44

Does anyone else feel other people's thoughts and emotions?

I get this all the time. It doesn't mean I know exactly what they're thinking. It's the emotions I get, mostly in the form of physical sensations but also, a bit less strongly than the physical feelings, as emotions.

I am autistic.

I've read about forms of hyper empathy and I think it might be that. I've had a lot of chances by now to gather evidence that it's really happening e.g. from my partner and my sister. I know things about what's happening with them and especially how they're feeling, with a precision that I couldn't know otherwise. They don't have to be physically with me, at all, for me to feel what they're going through.

I think contributes a lot to why I find being around other people too much quite exhausting, and having too many people in my life. Animals and nature are less draining and in fact generally have a relaxing feel, though I often pick up on anxiety or even fear from dogs e.g. on the bus or whatever.

Interested to hear if anyone else gets this. 

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  • Sir Simon Baron-Cohen who is a professor at the University of Cambridge and has a very significant role in helping to understand autism explains about empathy at a little after 32:20 in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFQVYcclqF0   He explains that empathy may be subdivided into cognitive empathy and affective empathy.

    Autistic people according to this struggle with (cognitively) imagining what other people might be thinking or feeling.  Unless they are told what the circumstances when they are very able to do so. 

    Affective empathy involves an automatic physiological and emotional response to another's state, leading to a shared emotional experience and this is not generally a problem for autistic people and may indeed be enhanced.  Perhaps this is the hyper empathy you describe?.

    To add another type of empathy to the mix there is physical empathy, sometimes called "somatic empathy".  According to a quote from google on the topic:  "While affective empathy is the emotional response to another's feelings, physical affective empathy goes a step further by manifesting as physical symptoms, like a stomach ache when someone is nervous or a blush when they are embarrassed."  

    I believe your description at the start of the thread  very well describes not knowing in your mind what the person is thinking however you are able to consciously "work around" this by being aware that your body does as it generates physical empathy.   I get what you do about dogs - my understanding and experience is that it goes both ways between the species. :-)

    Physically empathy at long distance which you also describe gets us into a whole other explanation to which I suggest 2 broad (possibly pseudo-)scientific possibilities that spring to my mind:

    1: would be some form of quantum entanglement as yet not, as far as I am aware, experimentally verified from physical sciences.

    2: would be that your (perhaps as an autistic trait exceptional) pattern recognition capability may be subconsciously identifying how the other person is feeling based upon all sorts of complex cues and identifiers historically.  (e.g. maybe what the person is like, how they have reacted in similar circumstances, anniversaries etc.)  In the absence of you being able to consciously be aware of this your body is telling you "in the moment" what the pattern recognition is suggesting the state of the person at long distance to you to be.  It is presenting it to you by physical empathy because it can't get it to you as a directly aware thought .  Again I am not aware of whether this is "formally" experimentally replicated. However the theory, i propose, is at least a feasible one?

    Personally I have experiences where I have been moved to contact people close to me after a long time and find there is a reason for it that appears to have pre-empted it.  Or they say "I was just thinking of you...".  This has happened vice versa.  This may be a similar situation of subconscious pattern recognition or maybe even that quantum entanglement?  Or maybe it is co-incidence, just good manners and one's mind tries to make sense of it?

    Thanks for leading me into this discussion :-) best wishes

Reply

  • Sir Simon Baron-Cohen who is a professor at the University of Cambridge and has a very significant role in helping to understand autism explains about empathy at a little after 32:20 in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFQVYcclqF0   He explains that empathy may be subdivided into cognitive empathy and affective empathy.

    Autistic people according to this struggle with (cognitively) imagining what other people might be thinking or feeling.  Unless they are told what the circumstances when they are very able to do so. 

    Affective empathy involves an automatic physiological and emotional response to another's state, leading to a shared emotional experience and this is not generally a problem for autistic people and may indeed be enhanced.  Perhaps this is the hyper empathy you describe?.

    To add another type of empathy to the mix there is physical empathy, sometimes called "somatic empathy".  According to a quote from google on the topic:  "While affective empathy is the emotional response to another's feelings, physical affective empathy goes a step further by manifesting as physical symptoms, like a stomach ache when someone is nervous or a blush when they are embarrassed."  

    I believe your description at the start of the thread  very well describes not knowing in your mind what the person is thinking however you are able to consciously "work around" this by being aware that your body does as it generates physical empathy.   I get what you do about dogs - my understanding and experience is that it goes both ways between the species. :-)

    Physically empathy at long distance which you also describe gets us into a whole other explanation to which I suggest 2 broad (possibly pseudo-)scientific possibilities that spring to my mind:

    1: would be some form of quantum entanglement as yet not, as far as I am aware, experimentally verified from physical sciences.

    2: would be that your (perhaps as an autistic trait exceptional) pattern recognition capability may be subconsciously identifying how the other person is feeling based upon all sorts of complex cues and identifiers historically.  (e.g. maybe what the person is like, how they have reacted in similar circumstances, anniversaries etc.)  In the absence of you being able to consciously be aware of this your body is telling you "in the moment" what the pattern recognition is suggesting the state of the person at long distance to you to be.  It is presenting it to you by physical empathy because it can't get it to you as a directly aware thought .  Again I am not aware of whether this is "formally" experimentally replicated. However the theory, i propose, is at least a feasible one?

    Personally I have experiences where I have been moved to contact people close to me after a long time and find there is a reason for it that appears to have pre-empted it.  Or they say "I was just thinking of you...".  This has happened vice versa.  This may be a similar situation of subconscious pattern recognition or maybe even that quantum entanglement?  Or maybe it is co-incidence, just good manners and one's mind tries to make sense of it?

    Thanks for leading me into this discussion :-) best wishes

Children
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