My earliest remembered example of a gulf in understanding relates to a coat hanger. We lived in an 1910s villa in the north of Christchurch and it was perpetually cold in winter. Old wooden villas have a lot in common with wooden tents. When the southwesterly wind blew, the carpet billowed upwards off the floor accompanied by frigid draughts. I'd wake up to frost on the inside of the white-painted sash windows beside my bed and race my brother to put my white school shirt closest to the glowing bar heater in the living room so I didn't have to flinch when the cold fabric touched my bare skin.

The glowing bar heater I understood but the long, cream-coloured heater in the hallway was a mystery. Radiant bars emanated heat like wood or coal in the fire – both glowed red-hot. Warm air issued from the cream heater but I couldn't see where it was coming from. Where was the hot bit? How did it work? I examined the heater from every angle but found nothing informative. I decided on my next investigative step – insert a coat hanger to see what happened.

I don't know why I chose a white plastic-covered coat hanger rather than a bare wire hanger. The plastic-covered hangers were the more expensive hangers. They didn't bend when you put clothes on them too enthusiastically or hung a heavy school gym frock. I closed the door between the living room and the hallway – Mum was in the kitchen at the far end of the house, beyond the living room.  I knew this was something I didn't want her to find out about. I took the hanger out of the cupboard in the hallway and wiggled it in through the narrow slot in the heater. It wasn't long before an acrid burning smell emanated from the heater. I tugged at the coat hanger until it was free, dripping melted plastic from its end.

This was bad. Mum would smell the burning coat hanger. I snuck through the closed door into the living room to retrieve old newspapers from the cupboard beside the fireplace which held kindling and fire-lighting material. Did I carry the coat hanger to the fireplace cupboard? Adult me hopes I didn't leave the coat hanger on the carpet to drip into the wool. Adult me also thinks child me was very unwise to go so close to the kitchen if I didn't want Mum to find out about the coat hanger. I returned quietly to the hallway, bundled the coat hanger in the newspaper and shoved the package into the dark recesses of the hall cupboard, behind our clothes (there was no cupboard in the bedroom my brother and I shared) and piles of boxes of games and jigsaws.

It took very few minutes until Mum threw the hall door open. Her speed amazed me. "What's that dreadful smell?" she said. Then she marched down the hall to the cupboard, opened it and homed straight in on the newspaper package containing the coat hanger. "What on earth were you doing, Jane?"

"Seeing how the heater worked."

"That was a very dangerous thing to do. You go to your room while I tidy up this mess."

Why was Mum so upset with me? The heater was still working and it was only a coat hanger that had melted. I had no proper sense of having risked getting a major electric shock. Mum knew about electric shocks – she had stuck a fork in an electric socket at a similar age and the current luckily projected her across the room so forcefully she lost her grip on the fork. I also had no idea how little money Mum and Dad had. Buying a new heater would have required budgeting – now I know Mum cried around that time when our hot water cylinder rusted through and she couldn't imagine how they would save enough money to have hot water again any time soon.

What lodged in my child brain was the entangled dual feeling of mystery – how did that heater work and why was Mum so upset? I pull the feeling out when I am mystified by the behaviour of others, as well as when I am driven by the need to experiment – at that age I needed practice in both empathy and science as I was doing neither successfully.

The postscript for the empathy writing exercise is that it's the experience of an American author running classes in writing for University students. This author, Rachel Kadish, says she no longer dares to ask her students to read their essays out loud. Students are too scared of being judged on the basis of what they have written – even though it is an imagined state they specifically abhor!

Rachel’s goal is for students to recognise they can simultaneously dislike a behaviour exhibited by a person while recognising shared humanity with that person – we are all humans. However, the exigencies of our times mean students are too scared to share their humanity with each other. That’s really scary.