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 While reading an article on emotions, I came across an explanation on the emotion sympathy.  Damasio described it as "...re-creat[ing] that person's pain to a certain degree internally" and the recreation of the pain does not come from an external stimuli but from a change that is stimulated by the brain itself ("Feeling our emotions" http://www.nature.com/scientificamericanmind/journal/v16/n1/full/scientificamericanmind0405-14.html).  What he said about sympathy really intrigued me and definitely reminded me of our discussion this week about the brain generating its own stimuli.  I am interpreting this article as saying that thoughts, while not external stimuli but internal stimuli, can bring about physical changes in our bodies which we can interpret as the emotion of sympathy.  This brings new meaning to the phrase "I feel your pain" because maybe if you thought hard enough, you could! I wonder if this has anything to do with people being able to make themselves cry by thinking of a really sad thought and then actually being sad so they really did need to cry.