Christian Keysers

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Christian Keysers
Born
Christian Keysers

(1973-06-27) 27 June 1973 (age 50)
NationalityGerman and French
OccupationScientist
EmployerNetherlands Institute for Neuroscience

Christian Keysers is a French and German neuroscientist.[1]

Education and career

He finished his school education at the

somatosensory cortex is active not only when you are being touched, but also if you see someone else being touched,[5] and that the insular cortex is active not only if people feel disgusted, but also if they see someone else being disgusted.[6] Together this indicated a general principle in which people process the actions, sensations and emotions of others by vicariously activating their own actions, sensations and emotions.[7] Jointly, this work laid the foundation of the neuroscientific investigation of empathy
. In 2004, Keysers and collaborator Gazzola opened the Social Brain Lab at the University of Groningen where they provided evidence for abnormal activity in somatosensory, motor and limbic brain structures in patients with abnormal empathy [1][8] [9] and that rats experience distress when they witnessed another animal in distress. This showed that rats can experience emotional contagion, a predecessor of empathy[10]

In 2010, Keysers moved to the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience (NIN) where he is currently a department head and leads the Social Brain Lab[permanent dead link] together with neuroscientist Valeria Gazzola. He is also a full professor at the University of Amsterdam. His team uncovered a mechanism responsible for emotional contagion by showing that rats have neurons in the cingulate cortex, a region involved in nociception, that respond both when a rat experiences pain and when it witnesses another animal experience pain, providing the first systematic evidence for the presence of emotional mirror neurons in the mammalian brain. Deactivating this brain region greatly reduced emotional contagion.[11] The team also showed that rats are averse to harming other rats, and that this also depends on the same region of the cingulate cortex.[12]

He has recently published a book called 'The Empathic Brain'.[1]

Awards and grants

Keysers has received the

Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research. He is a recipient of the Marie Curie Excellence Award and is a member of the Academia Europaea and a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science
.

References

  1. ^ a b c Keysers, Christian (23 June 2011). The Empathic Brain. Social Brain Press.
  2. S2CID 9433619
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  3. S2CID 7704309
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  4. S2CID 16923101
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  5. S2CID 1414735
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  6. S2CID 766157
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  7. PMID 17015092
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  8. S2CID 32646657
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  9. PMID 23884812
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  10. PMID 21765921
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  11. PMID 30982647
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  12. S2CID 212424287
    .

External links
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