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Even the smallest dose of power can change a person. You've probably seen it. Someone gets a promotion or a bit of fame and then, suddenly, they're a little less friendly to the people beneath them. Why? But if you ask Sukhvinder Obhi, a neuroscientist at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, Canada, he might give you another explanation: Power fundamentally changes how the brain operates. Everybody watched a simple video. In it, an anonymous hand squeezes a rubber ball a handful of times. Obhi's team tracked the participants' brains, looking at a special region called the mirror system. The mirror system contains neurons that become active both when you squeeze a rubber ball and when you watch someone else.... Whether you do it or someone else does, your mirror system activates. In this small way, the mirror system places you inside a stranger's head. It turns out, feeling powerless boosted the mirror system - people empathized highly. But, Obhi says, "when people were feeling powerful, the signal wasn't very high at all."