A trio of researchers at Stanford University has found the pathways in the parts of the mouse brain that become active when witnessing pain, fear and pain relief in other mice. In their paper published in the journal Science, Monique Smith, Naoyuki Asada and Robert Malenka describe their study of the neural pathways that are activated in the mouse anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) during empathy and what they learned about them. Alexandra Klein and Nadine Gogolla with the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology have published a Perspectives piece in the same journal issue outlining the work done by the team in Germany.