The Empathy Exams
Leslie Jamison — The Believer, 2014
Empathy isn’t just something that happens to us — a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain — it’s also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves. It’s made of exertion, that dowdier cousin of impulse.
Jamison spent time as a medical actor — paid to perform symptoms so doctors could practice diagnosis. From there: an excavation of what it actually means to pay real attention to someone else’s experience. Not the performance of care. The real thing.