Empathy is the ability to feel someone else's pain like it's your own. I have loads of it. And it turns out the closer you are to someone, the more you feel it - and your brain actually reacts physically as though you were indeed the one in pain. Pain has both a physical and emotional component. In this study, researchers showed that women's brains lit up in the same emotional areas when they watched their partners getting electrical shocks as when they were shocked themselves. And the closer they were to their partners, the more intensely their brains reacted.

I think that empathy is strongest when you've personally experienced physical or emotional pain and then watch someone else suffer through similar pain. And I think this is why when I got that email from my teenager yesterday I burst into tears, and continued to burst into tears whenever I thought about her throughout the day.

Oooohhh...this speaker (NYTimes link - requires registration/login) is so beautiful!! Dark and sleek and smart. It adjusts itself to compensate for poor furniture layout that might prevent optimal sound.

More about it here, too.