There are loads of interesting research out there. The neurosciences are in their infancy. I'm an old fart of a psychotherapist who often has trouble understanding or keeping up, but it is all very exciting and provocative.

re your post above, Ed T. Is empathy a learned behaviour, or something different - possibly related to some ancient social benefit related to survival?

My limited understanding of the research possible thus far indicates that biology shapes learning and that learning, i.e. experiences, mutually shape how the particular biology of an individual develops - particularly both the biological development of the brain and the neural pathways that develop (or don't).

One of the reasons for the success of us humans has been our tremendous diversity among individuals of our species in expressing the attributes along a continuum that at one end is "all about me" and on the other "all about us." Actually, several continuums (I don't know the plural of continuum and am too lazy to google the answer.)

The potential for any attribute, it seems to me, is likely to be genetically (evolutionarily) based. Our individual genomes can be understood - at least that is what I happen to think right now - as representing many, many possibilities for how they might be expressed individually. Experience, nurture, social learning which in some ways can be synonyms - can and apparently often do have significant influence on what attributes are likely to get more strongly expressed in an individual. But the genetics of each individual also influence what is learned from experience, nurture, social learning. Hence the diversity and variability.

Now that the globe is so crowded, will be interesting to see how it plays out for us as a species from an evolutionary perspective.