[grantph]

I have major issues with the entire article. 45 "healthy" students in an MRI is hardly solid evidence of anything. It's too small a sample to be meaningful. Presumably they were all students of "higher education" which may not represent society as a whole. Perhaps what they discovered simply represents the way the students have been educated/conditioned? What about other cultures and socio-economic groups?

I'm also skeptical of this kind of academic theory because it can be biased. If the theory doesn't pan out, then funding might stop. So better find data to support the theory.

Speaking from personal experience, I've always treated empathy as an analytic process. It simply involves additional perspectives. That's not intuition! Empathy is an extension of analysis. To claim they are mutually exclusive seems (feels?:) outrageous. It's also not consistent with other evidence that suggest that neural pathways can and will change. So why not both pathways or a hybrid pathway?

That leads to the duck-rabbit illusion where they say it's impossible to see both. I see both and it looks like a mutation. A quick search yields other interpretations too such as seeing neither. Seeing only the lines for what they are. (I can also see either duck or rabbit but the mutation is much cooler!)