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Several weeks ago, a who’s who of thinkers and researchers convened at a conference in the mountain town of Telluride, Colorado, to explore the science of compassion. Their discussions revealed growing consensus that the biological, physical, and behavioral properties of compassion—the feeling we get when confronted with suffering, infused with the urge to help—have evolved to help us survive.

The conference—called The Science of Compassion: Origins, Measures and Interventions—encouraged rich cross-disciplinary collaboration and promised to accelerate the pace and progress of scientific inquiry into compassion. (The conference was organized by Stanford’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education; the GGSC was a co-sponsor.) Here are three key insights I took away from the four days of discussion.

1. Compassion is push-pull

It turns out that feeling safe is a precondition to activating biological systems that promote compassion. In the face of another person’s suffering, the biological mechanisms that drive our nurturing and caregiving can only come online if our more habitual “self-preservation” and “vigilance-to-threat” systems (e.g. fear, distress, anxiety, hostility) are not monopolizing the spotlight.

In the other direction, having a genetic disposition and life history that’s led to a strong sense of social support, trust, and safety around people puts your “self-preservation” impulses at ease and opens the door for you to feel compassion.

How, then, can we relax vigilant, self-preservation systems so that our compassionate biology can more readily get into gear? University of Wisconsin researcher Helen Weng suggests the secret lies in the brain’s frontal lobes, which her studies show do a better job of calming alert signals from the amygdala (the brain’s almond shaped threat detector) when people complete a brief course in compassion.

This means that we can actually train our brains for compassion. When Charles Raison, another presenter, and his colleagues at Emory University also evaluated the effects of a compassion training course, they found lower stress hormones in the blood and saliva of people who spent the most time doing the compassion exercises.

But what’s in compassion training, one might ask? How does it boost the frontal lobes and attenuate stress hormones? Read on…

2. Compassion hinges upon mindfulness

The regular practice of mindfulness—moment to moment awareness of your body and mind—turns out to be a common theme across programs for training compassion, including those based at the University of Wisconsin, Emory University, CCARE, the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany, a consortium of clinicians in the United Kingdom, and, of course, 2,000 years of Buddhist tradition.

The opposite of mindfulness is sometimes referred to as “mindwandering”—reflexively thinking about what has happened, might have happened, or could or should happen. This very common non-mindful habit has been shown by Harvard researchers Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert to decrease happiness. Judson Brewer, a psychiatrist at Yale University, has shown that mindwandering involves a predictable brain area (the posterior cingulate cortex), and that people can phase out activation in this brain area by practicing mindfulness.

Compassion, data suggest, comes more readily if people can be more openly aware of the present moment as it is occurring, particularly in the presence of other’s suffering, without reflexive thinking or judgment. (For more on the links between compassion and mindfulness, stay tuned for details about the GGSC’s conference on the relationship between the two, to be held in March of 2013.)

3. Brains like helping the group more than helping the self

Studies using optogenetics, a technique for making populations of living brain cells fire, and fMRI, which measures how much oxygen neurons are using, show that the brain’s pleasure systems also play an important role in compassion.

For example, extending compassion toward others biases the brain to glean more positive information from the world, something called the “carryover effect.” Compassionate action—such as giving some of one’s own earnings to charity—also activates pleasure circuits, which some people call “the warm glow.”

In the words of Dr. Jamil Zaki, a professor of psychology at Stanford, “humans are the champions of kindness.” But why? Zaki’s brain imaging data shows that being kind to others registers in the brain as more like eating chocolate than like fulfilling an obligation to do what’s right (e.g., eating brussel sprouts). Brains find it more valuable to do what’s in the interest of the group than to do what’s most profitable to the self.


In his keynote address, Richie Davidson, the director of the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin, highlighted the legacy of philosophical thought—now corroborated by a growing body of research—suggesting that compassion is both fundamental and beneficial to human survival. Davidson advocated that academia—and all workplaces, for that matter—provide facilities and paid time for training compassion. When he shared a photo of the Tibetan-Buddhist-inspired onsite meditation facility at his center and discussed their “time off for retreat” policy, the crowd cheered enthusiastically.

While speakers like Davidson might have been academics, their insights can be applied to many domains of life—from marriages and neighborhoods to workplaces and schools—to spread compassion well beyond the mountains of Telluride.

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Originally posted by BYTEMITE:
...This is... Perhaps, the most terrifying and horror inducing article and link I have seen in recent times.

Good find, CTS. But it should have been posted around Halloween for best effect.

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Originally posted by HKCavalier:
What's interesting to me is how number 3 could account for a lot of the dysfunctional care-taking behavior I see around me. Folks get high on caring for others even, apparently, when their heart isn't in it. Just keep doing for others to maintain the rush. That's so unutterably sad.

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Originally posted by Niki2:
Okay, someone needs to explain to me why this is terrifying...

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In the face of another person’s suffering, the biological mechanisms that drive our nurturing and caregiving can only come online if our more habitual “self-preservation” and “vigilance-to-threat” systems (e.g. fear, distress, anxiety, hostility) are not monopolizing the spotlight.

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Originally posted by FREMDFIRMA:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TotalitarianUtilitarian

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Most of it makes sense. But how do you "train" an adult for compassion? I think that often if that isn't there its harder to get it going at a later date.

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Folks get high on caring for others even, apparently, when their heart isn't in it. Just keep doing for others to maintain the rush. That's so unutterably sad.

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I don't see anything threatening or frightening in this at all. Some of the recent developments in neuroscience are so hopeful and exciting and of course just add a scienfific basis to what a lot of people have observed to be true for a long time.

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It sounds like some of you have a gut aversion to some of this stuff. I wonder why that is?

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You know I don't find it sad at all. If you care for someone and that makes you feel good too, as the science shows that it does, isn't that double bonus. In the end, someone gets cared for, regardless of the motivation. And truthfully I think most people who either work in caring professions or just do it on a non professional basis, do it because they enjoy it. That is what keeps us looking after one another, and our children rather than being a sociopathic species. Its a positive feedback loop and I think it is a reality.

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There is nothing insidious in training your mind, as long as you are not coerced in to doing it. We train our mind every time we think, act or respond to a situation and we certainly influence the minds of those around us by our interactions.

It sounds like some of you have a gut aversion to some of this stuff. I wonder why that is?

The great thing about the research on the brain that is taking place now is how much the brain is able to be changed, the so called 'plasticity' of it.

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Originally posted by FREMDFIRMA:
Mostly because of a long established and well known history of the powers that be here in America using such information in manipulative or nefarious ways, or exploiting it for gain rather than putting the knowledge to any noble, decent purpose.

For example: Right now they're prolly thinking about how to use this to wind up sympathy for the 1% rather than to encourage americans to help their fellows through these troubled times, how to exploit compassion for gain rather than apply it to the benefit of all.

They've prove themselves without exception to be wholly unworthy of trust, you see, and thus anything involving them MUST be viewed with skepticism and mistrust, until proven out or confirmed by folk with more trustworthy motives, as a direct result of fifty and more years of malicious behavior - to set an example more familiar to you, if Rupert Murdoch funded and performed such a study, I bet you would scrutinize it mistrustfully six ways to sunday as well, you see ?

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Ayep, and I consider it a good thing, but the yahoos in charge of our society consider it a vile thing, the Randroid concept of altruism-as-evil, and they would much much rather replace it with the cycle of abuse which creates sociopathic monsters like them.

For mine own, I derive great satisfaction from protecting this site, both as a personal "turf" issue and because I really do care about these people, in a distant-detatched kinda way, ain't that I LIKE them, any of em, it is that they are "my" people, and "my" community, by choice, even if I mostly have nothing at all to do with em.
Of course, part of that is my morality seems damn near guaranteed to offend cause of the petty hypocrisies, double-dealing, verbal/legal backstabbing and personal politics/drama people engage in and my complete intolerance for it, so I shortcut the process by simply not associating with anyone where I reside personally and concentrating on professional capacity only, with a side order of assisting them at whim outside of that only IF I choose to do so, which I mostly do.

I like what I do, I like protecting them, I do not, and probably will not, ever like THEM, in a personal capacity, but that is plenty enough for me.

-Frem

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Originally posted by HKCavalier:
Hey Magons,

You misunderstand me. I agree with everything you've just posted except the implied characterization of my feelings. You don't really imagine that I would be sad because caring for others makes people feel good, do you? Does that make any sense at all, knowing me (insomuch as we "know" each other, cyberspacially)?

HKCavalier

Hey, hey, hey, don't be mean. We don't have to be mean, because, remember, no matter where you go, there you are.

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Originally posted by canttakesky:

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In the face of another person’s suffering, the biological mechanisms that drive our nurturing and caregiving can only come online if our more habitual “self-preservation” and “vigilance-to-threat” systems (e.g. fear, distress, anxiety, hostility) are not monopolizing the spotlight.

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Anyone who has heard a war buddy story will know this is simply not true. Some of the most compassionate and empathic acts have been performed during situations of threat, vigilance, and general state of UNsafety. It makes me wonder what definition of compassion they used, to conclude it occurs only in safe situations.

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3. Compassion can be trained. On the face of it, there is nothing wrong with that. But in the context of the whole article, it sounds just a bit like they are saying compassion doesn't always come naturally (e.g. limits to when we can feel compassion--only when we're safe and mindful) and HAS to be trained. It makes me wonder what this compassion training entails, esp since they aren't defining what kind of compassion they are shooting for.

The idea of "psychological training" or um, re-education, should always beg these questions: HOW are you training and WHAT EXACTLY are you training for.

Maybe they're all on the up and up. But I think there also room for some questions here.

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