Painkillers and Empathy

>> All too often, modern medicine only offers people a choice between two evils rather than a true solution. <<

That's one of many reasons I have less and less interest in it over time. Frex, the drug companies have done a bang-up job of unselling their products by listing all the horrible side effects followed by "See your doctor immediately if..." Have those lunatics ever tried to see a doctor "immediately"? It takes weeks or months. In an emergency room, it takes hours, unless you happen to be a middle-aged white man with a classic heart attack or you're spurting blood on their ceiling. Most medications sound like you'd just be trading the problem you have for major organ damage. :/

>> A thought has occurred to me:
Is it possible that area(s) of the brain that perceive "pain" are also involved with "empathy"?
Wouldn't be the first time modern medicine has come across an incidence of a brain area multi-tasking--even though the tasks at first glance seem to be wildly un-related to each other.<<

It's the mirror neurons. When bad things happen to you, your brain lights up a "pain" pattern, and there's a lot of overlap between physical and emotional pain effects there. That's why painkillers have a slight buffering effect on emotional pain, though they don't work near as well and we don't have anything that works better. When bad things happen to someone else, the mirror neurons project "what if that happened to me?" and most of the same pain system lights up, making you feel bad for the other person instead of yourself. Well, if your pain system is blunted with drugs, you don't feel as much of that empathy because the carryover can't get through. You might still have a logical sense that something bad has happened, but you're less likely to feel it.

This is one way that drugs can impair mystical abilities. If they block the physical apparatus for running it, the ability works less well or not at all, and you feel like you've got your head in a sack.