Heirarchies of empathy in the brain

 The following is a response I provided to an article.

I am autistic and have serious problems with sensory overload. Like other autistic people I have problems with my lack of empathy. For example I never had much of a romantic life in large part due to my complete inability to read signals from women and perceive that they were interested in me. But seven years ago I did begin having rare flashes of empathy so I suspect that my brain has partially figured out how to complete the neural circuitry to support empathy. But the idea of a hierarchy of empathy does seem very likely to me. At the moment I am trapped in my apartment due to an extreme case of sensory overload. Oddly enough I am also experiencing a serious problem with emotional overload. I am unable to view examples of powerful emotions with out needing to immediately disconnect. Neither can I read something if it contains emotional content. Yet some part of my brain is obviously involved in empathy or else I wouldn't even be aware that I was dealing with an expression of strong emotion. So I must have empathy operating within the more primitive part of the brain. My problems with processing powerful negative emotions, while not being able to perceive more nuanced and subtle emotions is deeply consistent with this idea. And nothing gives me greater problems than to hear a child cry, I am absolutely unable to tolerate it. I imagine in most humans the interlinking from the mammalian brain that provide feedback to the primitive brain allow most people to quickly become alert when a child cries and then to moderate the experience to a manageable level.