The origins of empathy

When I was a graduate student at the University of Washington, I took a course in Anatomy & Physiology.  The anatomy part turned out to be easier than I'd anticipated, because I've got a decent memory for names of things and also because my friends and I learned the various organs and tissues using acronyms that ranged from vulgar to outright obscene.  (One of the more printable ones: for the nerve branches of the face -- temporal, zygomatic, buccal, mandibular, and cervical -- "Tommy Zimmerman's bowels move constantly."  Okay, it's gross, but y'know what?  Writing this, thirty years later, I still remembered them without looking 'em up.)

The physiology part was more of a challenge, but however hard the course was, learning about the complexity of what was going on inside my own body was downright fascinating.

The topic comes up, though, not because of the content but because of the attitude of the professor.  In one of the labs, we were to do a dissection of a recently-killed mouse, and the professor demonstrated how to kill one humanely.  I'm not saying I was unaware that lab animals are routinely killed, nor that learning how to dispatch one humanely if you must isn't a good idea.  What bothered me was that the professor was downright callous about the whole thing, laughing as he picked up the mouse he was about to kill, saying, "Oh, well, life's tough, buddy.  Any last words?  No?  Okay, then."

I was pretty appalled.  I went into biology in large part because I have a tremendous respect for the living world.  Again, I'm not naïve; "nature is red in tooth and claw," and all that sort of thing.  I eat meat and wear leather shoes and am fully in support of (responsible) hunting, and am aware that I'm just another animal occupying his position in the food chain.

But for me, the focus is respect.  Okay, sometimes animals will die, to provide food or other resources, or to support laboratory research.  But every effort should be made to treat them kindly and humanely, to hold their lives and well-being with respect insofar as you can.  There is no excuse for a cavalier attitude toward life -- toward any life.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Rama, Lab mouse mg 3157, CC BY-SA 2.0 FR]

When I voiced my opinion to the professor -- saying something like, "I know you have to kill the mice sometimes, but do you have to laugh about it?" -- his laughter grew louder, but directed toward me now. "What does it matter?" he said.  "The mouse dies either way."

I said, "That attitude makes you less sensitive to reducing the fear and suffering it experiences."

Now his laughter turned to incredulity.  "You're not going to have a very long career in biology if you think animals have emotions.  You start anthropomorphizing mice, you're going to have a rough time of it."

I decided to choose my battles (not least because he was going to be giving me my grades), and didn't argue further.  But I said to a friend later that day, "If that guy thinks animals don't have emotions, he must never have owned a pet in his life."  The bond between me and my dogs is not just because I pet them and give them dog kibble; in fact, experiments have shown that when a dog sees its beloved owner, it experiences a spike of the hormone oxytocin -- same as humans do when they're with their friends.  I've seen dogs grieve; when our lovable, hyper, eccentric border collie, Doolin, died at the ripe old age of 13, our other dog, Grendel, went into a positive decline.  He hardly ate or played.  All he wanted to do was sleep, curled up with one of Doolin's favorite toys, for several weeks before he began to get over losing his friend.

But even if I'd brought that kind of thing up, I'm sure the professor would have called it "anecdotal," if not something even more dismissive; and at that point, the oxytocin experiments were still in the future.  But this week a paper in Science by Monique Smith, Naoyuki Asada, and Robert Malenka of Stanford University has conclusively demonstrated that not only do animals experience fear and suffering, they are acutely aware of the fear and suffering of other animals.

In other words: they experience empathy, just as humans do.  And if my professor from long ago is still around, I want you to note: the experiment was done on...

...mice.

In a paper titled "Anterior Cingulate Inputs to Nucleus Accumbens Control the Social Transfer of Pain and Analgesia," Smith et al. show that exposing a mouse to another mouse who is showing overt signs of distress causes a response in the part of the brain that regulates emotional state.  The authors write, "In mice, both pain and fear can be transferred by short social contact from one animal to a bystander.  Neurons in a brain region called the anterior cingulate cortex in the bystander animal mediate these transfers.  However, the specific anterior cingulate projections involved in such empathy-related behaviors are unknown."

I've never really understood how a biologist could honestly believe non-human animals don't have emotions, given that (1) we're animals, and (2) damn near everything about us from our intelligence on down exists along some kind of spectrum in other animal species.  It's really just a vestige of the old "human/animal" dichotomy, that there was some kind of qualitative difference between us and the rest of the living world -- be it a spirit, a soul, or (in the case of my professor) some undefinable something that makes our suffering relevant and theirs not.  

But the Smith et al. paper puts that to rest, hopefully once and for all.  I can only hope that it will lead to more humane treatment of animals in general.  They feel emotions -- perhaps not with the sophistication we do, but that's a far cry from claiming they have no emotions at all.

And if that doesn't alter the perceptions and behaviors of the scientists, they are discounting the results of science because it's inconvenient -- meaning they hardly merit the title "scientist."

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What are you afraid of?

It's a question that resonates with a lot of us.  I suffer from chronic anxiety, so what I am afraid of gets magnified a hundredfold in my errant brain -- such as my paralyzing fear of dentists, an unfortunate remnant of a brutal dentist in my childhood, the memories of whom can still make me feel physically ill if I dwell on them.  (Luckily, I have good teeth and rarely need serious dental care.)  We all have fears, reasonable and unreasonable, and some are bad enough to impact our lives in a major way, enough that psychologists and neuroscientists have put considerable time and effort into learning how to quell (or eradicate) the worst of them.

In her wonderful book Nerve: Adventures in the Science of Fear, journalist Eva Holland looks at the psychology of this most basic of emotions -- what we're afraid of, what is happening in our brains when we feel afraid, and the most recently-developed methods to blunt the edge of incapacitating fears.  It's a fascinating look at a part of our own psyches that many of us are reluctant to confront -- but a must-read for anyone who takes the words of the Greek philosopher Pausanias seriously: γνῶθι σεαυτόν (know yourself).

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Anesthetized by power

Watching Donald Trump and our other so-called leaders over the last year and a half has been one long exercise in horrified astonishment.  The graft, corruption, self-aggrandizement, and bullying are beyond anything I've ever seen in government in my fifty-odd years of being at least somewhat aware of what was going on.  And, merciful heavens above, the lying.  An article was going around a few days ago that had the headline, "How Can You Tell If Donald Trump Is Lying?"  My answer to that question is, "If his lips are moving."

But the one thing that has stood out the most is the utter lack of empathy and compassion.  It's in the news every single day.  Our fellow humans called "animals," and anyone who even suggests that we should come up with a humane policy for illegal immigrants is shouted down as someone who "loves MS-13" (the notorious, ultraviolent Central American gang that has established itself in the United States).  At the same time, pretending that the humanitarian crises over a lack of drinkable water in Flint, Michigan, and a lack of basic necessities in Puerto Rico, simply don't exist.  (And here, the "they're illegals" argument doesn't work; we're talking about American citizens.)

Some recent research, led by University of California - Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner, has given us a lens into why this sort of thing is appallingly common.  He has studied the dynamics of power, and in particularly, how power interacts with a sense of empathy, and found something disturbing; power seems to dull a person's capacity for empathy, even in people who were empathetic to start with.

Keltner writes:

These findings suggest that iconic abuses of power—Jeffrey Skilling’s fraudulent accounting at Enron, Tyco CEO Dennis Kozlowski’s illegal bonuses, Silvio Berlusconi’s bunga bunga parties, Leona Helmsley’s tax evasion—are extreme examples of the kinds of misbehavior to which all leaders, at any level, are susceptible.  Studies show that people in positions of corporate power are three times as likely as those at the lower rungs of the ladder to interrupt coworkers, multitask during meetings, raise their voices, and say insulting things at the office.  And people who’ve just moved into senior roles are particularly vulnerable to losing their virtues, my research and other studies indicate.

The problem seems to be a loss of the capacity for what psychologists call "mirroring" -- being able to imagine yourself in someone else's mind.  This ability is critical for compassion; it's why many of us have a hard time watching violent scenes in movies, because we imagine ourselves in that situation all too easily.  A 2006 study by Adam D. Galinsky, Joe C. Magee, M. Ena Inesi, and Deborah Gruenfeld showed that just priming a person's brain by having half the subjects recall a time during which they were in a position of high power, and the other half a time during when they were powerless, alters their ability to perform simple mirroring tests -- such as drawing a letter "E" on their own forehead, in the proper orientation to someone who is looking at their face.  Even recalling being in a powerful position made a person more likely to be "self-oriented" -- and to draw the E backwards with respect to everyone else.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons NeetiR, Leadership and Power, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Wilfred Laurier University psychologists Sukhvinder Obhi and Jeremy Hogeveen, and University of Toronto - Scarborough researcher Michael Inzlicht, have found something even more interesting, and considerably more frightening.  They put test subjects into an fMRI machine, and had them watch a simple video -- for example, of someone squeezing a rubber ball.  The "non-powerful group" showed strong activation of the parts of the brain that would fire if the subject him/herself were squeezing the ball; they were, apparently, imagining themselves doing the task.  The "powerful group," though, showed much less activation of those pathways.

The authors write:

[T]he main results we report are robust, and strongly suggest that power is negatively related to motor resonance.  Indeed, anecdotes abound about the worker on the shop floor whose boss seems oblivious to his existence, or the junior sales associate whose regional manager never remembers her name and seems to look straight through her in meetings.  Perhaps the pattern of activity within the motor resonance system that we observed in the present study can begin to explain how these occurrences take place and, more generally, can shed light on the tendency for the powerful to neglect the powerless, and the tendency for the powerless to expend effort in understanding the powerful.

The Obhi et al. experiment's conclusion is profoundly depressing.  Recall that the test subjects weren't actually different in their overall power level; they were all college students who had simply been primed to recall being powerful, or not.  Obhi remarked that the mirroring pathways in the "powerful group" appeared to be "anesthetized" -- and would presumably return to their baseline once the experiment was over.

What about people who are in more-or-less permanent positions of power?  Could a long enough exposure to being in a power role permanently damage the ability to feel empathy?  It's easy enough to believe that about Donald Trump, who has had the money and position to pull everyone's strings at will for decades.  But the results of the research supports the famous line from Lord Acton, that "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."  It'd be nice to think that the most empathetic and compassionate of us would still feel that way if we were elected to public office, but the truth seems to be darker than that.  I surmise that the individuals with the highest levels of empathy probably wouldn't run for office in the first place, but that's a guess.  But those that do seem inevitably to experience a dulling of their capacity for compassion.

As David Owen and Jonathan Davidson wrote in an article on hubris in the journal Brain in 2009:

Charisma, charm, the ability to inspire, persuasiveness, breadth of vision, willingness to take risks, grandiose aspirations and bold self-confidence—these qualities are often associated with successful leadership.  Yet there is another side to this profile, for these very same qualities can be marked by impetuosity, a refusal to listen to or take advice and a particular form of incompetence when impulsivity, recklessness and frequent inattention to detail predominate.  This can result in disastrous leadership and cause damage on a large scale.  The attendant loss of capacity to make rational decisions is perceived by the general public to be more than ‘just making a mistake’.  While they may use discarded medical or colloquial terms, such as ‘madness’ or ‘he's lost it’, to describe such behaviour, they instinctively sense a change of behaviour although their words do not adequately capture its essence.

It bears keeping this in mind when we look at our own leaders -- especially in situations, such as the current administration, where it appears that the branches of government tasked with providing checks and balances on the power of the leaders has decided instead to give them carte blanche to do anything they want -- however foolish, ignorant, callous, and inhumane their actions are.

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This week's recommended book is one that blew me away when I first read it, upon the urging of a student.  By groundbreaking neuroscientist David Eagleman, Incognito is a brilliant and often astonishing analysis of how our brains work.  In clear, lucid prose, Eagleman probes the innermost workings of our nervous systems -- and you'll learn not only how sophisticated it is, but how easy it can be to fool.

Empathy training

A couple of days ago, I had a migraine.

I was fortunate in a couple of respects.  First, I hardly get migraines at all any more -- by comparison with my early twenties, a period in my life during which I was getting them two or three times a week.  Second, this one was pretty mild.  Not much in the way of pain, and no nausea.  When I used to get migraines, it came with pain so bad it felt like someone had my head trapped in a vise, not to mention gut-twisting nausea, sometimes for 24 hours straight.

Mostly what I experienced this time was visual disturbances and generalized brain fog.  When I get a migraine, lights are uncomfortably bright -- I feel like I need to wear sunglasses indoors -- and anything shiny or reflective has a halo or starburst surrounding it.  My hearing also gets terribly sensitive, and there's something about the quality of the sound that changes.  Everything has a weird, echoic sound, even my internal chatter -- the closest I can come to describing it is that it feels like my head is hollow, and there's someone in that empty space shouting at the top of his lungs.

The brain fog is a little hard to describe, too.  I honestly don't remember large chunks of the day.  I didn't feel bad enough to justify staying home from school, although I should have; heaven only knows what I told my classes.  I suspect that if I'd said anything too dopey, someone would have asked me what the hell was wrong with me (my students are just up-front and honest like that), and no one did.  But I do recall feeling a little disembodied, like I was watching someone else go through the motions of the day, but not really fully understanding what I was seeing and hearing.

Luckily for me, after a good night's sleep I felt a great deal better, although still a little foggier than usual.  But what it makes me realize is how impossible it is for someone who hasn't experienced something like a migraine to understand fully what it's like.  The painkiller company Excedrin has created virtual reality goggles that recreate some of the visual effects, and it's well worth watching; one of the non-migraine-sufferers who wore the goggles for a few minutes said, "Oh, my God, I don't even know how you function."

Of course, the same could be said about any debilitating disease.  Depression.  Fibromyalgia.  Chronic fatigue syndrome.  Chronic back pain.  Trigeminal neuralgia.  Obsessive-compulsive disorder.  Bipolar disorder.  Multiple sclerosis.  Schizophrenia.  About this last one, Anderson Cooper spent some time wearing earphones that simulated what it was like for a person to hear voices, and what has struck me every time I've seen it is how it destroyed his ability to focus and left him completely wrung out emotionally -- even though he knew the whole time that it was a simulation.

It's why I get a little defensive when I see stuff like this:

You know what?  If you haven't experienced depression, I can almost guarantee that you don't get it.  Some of us are only alive because of antidepressants.  You can rail against "Big Pharma" all you want, but if -- as is the case with a friend of mine -- someone is only able to lead a normal life because of some medication that causes the firestorm in their brain to calm to manageable proportions, then you have no damn right to give them another thing to feel inadequate about.

And the same is true of all the other chronic illnesses, especially the ones that produce few obvious outward symptoms.  You can remedy this to some extent by talking to people who actually live with disorders like these, or better still, try a migraine simulator or schizophrenia simulator.  I can almost guarantee that afterwards you will be far less hasty to conclude that the people with these conditions need to just "suck it up and deal," or (worse) "get over it," or (worst of all) that they're faking it.

Believe me, when I was in the throes of a full-blown migraine, I would have given damn near anything to be rid of it permanently.  Sucking it up and dealing wasn't really high on my priorities list.  I was more concerned with wondering if I would ever be able to leave my darkened room for any other reason than running to the bathroom to puke.

It's all about empathy, really.  Just because you are lucky enough not to suffer from a particular illness (or, if you're extraordinarily lucky, any chronic illnesses at all), don't roll your eyes at others for doing what they need to in order to cope.  Spend some time thinking what it would be like to inhabit another person's body and brain -- perhaps a body and brain that don't cooperate as readily as yours do.

It brings back to mind something a wise family friend told me when I was about ten, after I was complaining about how hard it was to be nice to a particular classmate of mine.  "Always be more compassionate than you think you need to be," she said.  "Because everyone you meet is fighting a terrible battle that you know nothing about."