The Doctor Who Can Feel Peoples’ Pain Is Teaching Us About Empathy 🔗 👨‍⚕️ 🧠 👥

Joel Salinas can literally feel his patients’ pain. But as scientists are learning, there’s more to empathy than just mirroring someone else.

Before the alarm sounded, the two men were strangers. Seconds after, 24-year-old Joel Salinas and the man having a heart attack became linked—not just by Salinas’s medical responsibility to try to save him, but by an incredible fluke of the brain that allowed Salinas to intimately experience what the man was feeling. Salinas has a condition called mirror touch synesthesia, which means, simply, that when he sees another person feel something, he feels it too.