The Brain and the Mind - Discussion 3 of 6: The Workings of Empathy

[Music] [Music] and broadly it's an attempt by me and by lisa opinionazi um to get artists and scientists to listen to and respond to each other in an attempt to further our understanding of mind and brain i'm hoping this will be especially possible today because the topic is empathy and so we'll all be at our most empathetic and because we really couldn't have three more exciting appropriate and eminent speakers um to address this question chris frith is emeritus professor of neuropsychology at the welcome center for neuroimaging at ucl and a fellow of all souls oxford and he's a pioneer in the use of brain imaging to the study of mental processes he's the author of more than 400 academic papers which is a terrifying number as an academic and also of a recent book called making up the mind how the brain creates our mental world which i'd really recommend as a very engaging take on the neuroscientific mind and i started reading this book in preparation for today and was somewhat unnerved to find that much of the book is written as an imaginary dialogue with an extremely naive professor of english and um he said he sets about trying to rid her of her assumption that literary types know more than neuroscientists about the true nature of consciousness but luckily we'll have no such assumptions today um and luckily also i was very pleased to find that in fact their relationship becomes much less rebarbative largely because it seems to take place over a series of drinks parties in which the wine flows plentifully so i've tried to ply chris with drink before we started but sadly he only took the tea darian leader is a very eminent psychoanalyst working in london and a founder member of the center for freudian analysis and research he's the president of the college of psychoanalysts uk and is the author of several wonderfully wonderful and also very brilliantly titled books including why do women write more letters than they post what art stops us from seeing why do people get ill and what is madness fiona shaw is of course one of our most acclaimed actors um for stage and screen as well as a very talented director her range is vast spanning greek tragedy to broad comedy from a lecture the taming of the shrew had a gabler london assurance to harry potter she's also recently added directing opera to her many talents with brilliant productions of elegy for young lovers and the marriage of figaro and we're especially grateful that she's here tonight because she's currently starring in rep at the national in um and howard barker scenes for many execution which is a really extraordinary and i imagine extremely exhausting performance and you still have a chance to catch it i think very briefly um and she may tell us a bit about it or certainly about other roles tonight so the format for the evening is that each of our speakers will talk for five minutes i will direct a discussion between them and then we will open two questions from the floor and then there'll be a drinks reception to which we'd love you to come um outside so just before they talk um they start i wanted to just give everyone a couple of definitions of empathy to sort of bear in the back of our minds um largely because i think we all fiona were saying earlier as well that once you start googling empathy it becomes quite a minefield particularly because um sympathy was was the word originally used in the english language for what we now see as empathy um [Music] hume in the 18th century described sympathy as the process by which affections pass from one creature to another and beget correspondent movements in every human creature so that was a propensity to pick up on the feelings of others the oxford english dictionary describes sympathy as an affinity between certain things um by virtue of which they're similarly or correspondingly affected by the same influence so sympathy was the main word used until the germans came up with the word ein fuelling um meaning feeling into in 1873 originally to describe art how we're moved into art and feel our way into it this then entered the english language in 1909 and the oxford english dictionary now defines empathy as the power of projecting one's personality into and so fully comprehending the object of contemplation so there's a big debate about whether to use sympathy and empathy and in what context about whether each of them is voluntary or involuntary about whether empathy involves an identification and a blurring of selves or whether we retain during empathy the distinction between itself and other all of which may come into our discussion so now without further ado i would like to turn to fiona will you tell me when i've spoken for five minutes i will um good evening well i thought i might be useful to this discussion not because i would know any science or any conclusions but because i am as an actress have two relationships to empathy one is something i can do nothing about which is that the audience may we hope empathize with the characters that the actor is playing this has been so hijacked by the personality of the actor that it doesn't it no longer really functions as a sort of true uh communication between the audience and the actor i mean it does but it is it's connected to charm and all sorts of things where people are given a pathway into a character whilst also knowing that the person playing the character is in control of the character but the more private relationship to empathy is the one that i have is how i find a play in the first place how i find any parts that i might want to play so sometimes people suggest parts to you they say you know they at the moment for no particular reason people keep saying why did you play cleopatra i think i'm too young no i'm not um but if i were to i that what i would do is i would take the play of anthony cleopatra and i would start to read it and oddly i would not mind whether it was my part or another part i will just wait for a line or a word that suddenly affects me and i've always had this relationship to it and it could be that the word that i might pick all of me they're famous phrases on the anti-cleopatra a part i haven't played at you know you know he wrote the story with the seas like a colossus i mean there are all sorts of famous things i am dying egypt dying there are sort of wonderful phrases that have no particular informational power or psychological obvious connection i'm dying egypt dying do you think shakespeare never even went to egypt but somehow this phrase holds meaning and it is it is in this sort of emotional illogicality that one finds one's place that once empathizes finds the point of contact and it's what i call plumb lines so i'm just going to give you a few examples and it may be of use to the discussion but when i played katherine in the taming of the shrew it's a stupid play the tape of the shoe and it should very rarely be done it's not a good play and clearly shakespeare wrote it to make a lot of money it has very little poetry the only poetry in it is at the very end actually where catherine finally finds her voice having been freed or tamed and she says you know wifi on it that threatening unkind brow and dark not scornful dances from those eyes to whom thy lord thy king thy governor it blots thy beauty as frost you bite the meat blabla she speaks in a kind of phrasing that nobody else has spoken in during the entire place as if he suddenly thought i better write a poem now so suddenly appointment but very early on in that play i had agreed to play it for dr jonathan miller who was very keen on the psychoanalytic element of the shrew and decided that catherine was a patient and that petruchio was a doctor and he talked about the haverstock clinic and you know that some children would come in behaving very badly and sometimes the doctor would take um the desk and throw the desk over and that would shock the child who was delinquent in its behavior i fundamentally don't feel the plays are about neurosis i feel they're about people they're about the stresses of people they're about the pendulum swing of experience which pushes the emotional area to its utmost before madness i don't think the moment they reach madness then you call in doctors and you're not really watching a play you're watching a patient so i'm very keen i wasn't so keen on that idea that that that the thing about castle in the shoe is she needed a doctor she needed she needed her identity and it was a lie this is not at all intellectual i didn't like what i was reading i'll kick your novel with a three-legged stool she says really ugly phrases but like a sort of lion petruchio is released into her and he says good morrow kate for that's your name i hear and she says well have you heard but something hard of hearing they call me catherine that do talk of me and i was so moved having had all the bias against this play that this young woman wanted to be called her name in fact everyone calls her kate but she wants to be called catherine and in that moment i knew that there was a real person in the play who was desperate to get out and it didn't matter how foolish her language was how silent she was going to have to be during act 3 when the so-called battle of the sexes results in petruchio mutilating her with seven i think five sevenths of the language of the play and she has about one seventh and the other characters for the other seventh and it is not a battle of the sexes it is a complete onslaught of catherine by petruccio but we will leave that be for tonight but at that moment of they call me catherine they do talk of me i knew who she was similarly and as you like it when i played rosalind there's a phrase that takes more breath than any other phrase which is that rosalind says to orlando who's you know testing her whether she loves them or not she says no no orlando men are able when they woo december when they weds may or may when it is made but the sky changes when they are wives and something about that phrase made me know that i could meet her i didn't analyze it it's nothing to do with my history or who i am and so too with cath with them beatrice in what you do about nothing is that famously you know she laughs all the time and there's a wonderful scene where finally she has a battle with her potential lover um um benedick who she's really scoffed all the way through and he says lady beatrice have you wept all this while she goes yeah and i will weep but why longer i would not desire that you have no reason surely i do believe your fair cousin is wrong oh how much might the man deserve for me that would write her she speaks in this battle and she she's always embattled with him but early on in the play somebody says you're always laughing more or less that's what they say and she says no he's you were you were born under a wonderful star or something she says no sure my mother cried but then a star danced and under that i was born and i knew when i read that that i knew who she was and it's not that i was a star dance when i was born but something about the person is in profound contradiction to the rest of their behavior and at that moment of disjuncture between what we decide they are and who they really are in this strange vacuum is where the actress steps in and brings herself and uh i i mean i could give you endless examples but probably the most interesting perhaps with this discussion is that i played madea some years ago where everyone feels that madea is a bad person because very early on she says i'll kill the children and i remembered and she doesn't you know because the play has an hour and a half to go and a lot of plots and turns before she kills the children but my mother often used to say if you don't come in for your supper i'll annihilate you um a woman built an understatement and i realize that many mothers say they're going to kill their children it doesn't mean for one minute they are they actually would kill for their children and for me the empathetic point was the fact that she said i'll kill the children is that i felt she was absolutely saying the opposite she was saying i feel so badly about you jason i feel i could kill the children but that she wouldn't say the phrase if she had intended to kill the children and therefore when she does kill the children she kills them for quite another reason she kills them to save them from other people who might kill her children and it is in that dark place of the human mind that curses when we tell somebody to f off or whatever we you know when we say god i had a really day last yesterday you think is a terrible word to be using about a day that these phrases sometimes belie our desire to disguise something and sometimes they reveal a real truth about who we are and it's all in the imaginative relationship of the moment of empathy and i'll conclude by saying that some years ago i had my brain scanned again by the welcome trust and uh was performing just a few lines from t.s eliot's the waste end and during these lines the character in the poem who is mrs elliot um says pretty well because we know this because in the margin of the poem she has written the phrase wonderful as if thomas jones elliot has really captured some truth about their life he has written a piece where he's taken ordinary speech and turned it into poetry that sounds like ordinary speech this is the same trick shakespeare used to do to take ordinary speech put it into the iambic pentameter and yet when you hear it you think somebody has just spoken it and hasn't minted it and she says my nerves are bad tonight yes bad stay with me speak to me why do you never speak speak what are you thinking of what thinking what i never knew what you were thinking think he says i think we are in rats alley where the dead men lost their bones now during that little section for me to be able to say my nerves are bad tonight yes bad stay with me speak to me i have to see the woman and i see her at my mother's dressing table my mother has a dressing table that makes hiroshima look like a sort of neat garden my mother's dressing table has never been mended in 45 years there are bits of lipstick there's hairpins there's bits of perfumes a bit earlier we hear about the unground powders and perfumes belonging to this woman which is kind of cleopatra and kind of ts eliot's wife so i did i was taken by that as my mother's dressing table which has got a sort of base now worn down to nothing lined with a sort of inlaid thing it's a huge mirror and a picture of herself very nearby she's very keen on herself my mother so i think somewhere my mother was in my mind when i go my nerves are bad tonight yes bad stay with me speak to me why do you never speak and my mother has a very big bedroom with two georgian windows so i'm often when i say those lines in the poem i'm in that room my mother's bedroom the two georgia windows the dressing table because i must as a child remember her getting ready in front of this mirror doing things like this oh yes i'm coming oh i must just get myself ready but instead i have this woman going my nails are bad tonight just bad stay with me speak to me why do you never speak so i was had my brain scanned while i said these lines and what they found in my brain was a there was a brain which i was so surprised b the bits that went yellow when i spoke was of course the language section of the brain just behind the ear and the other bit of the brain that went was um don't remember now um language definitely um oh yes two things two various things one is the lady's doing this in my mind it's my mother really my nose backstory she's absolutely one was the arms were going now i was lying in an mri scanner just with my arms relaxed but my arms were going in my brain but the arms themselves were not twitching or in any way tense they were just at ease but most interestingly for me was the architecture part of the brain started to activate so all i'm saying is my nerves are bad tonight yes bad stay with me speak to me why do you never speak and a body is moving in my brain the language is moving in my brain and the architecture is moving my brain and i think that is because the empathetic point for me is where i fuse my childhood my parents my experience and new language [Applause] thank you very much terry hey kate thank you very much that was a wonderful insight into your craft and your experience laura asked me to say something about how psychoanalysis views empathy a difficult if not impossible task because there are many different traditions and schools of psychoanalysis and many of them have radically different and generally incompatible theories of how the mind works and also theories of how practice ought to work so what i'll do is just make a very very simple contrast between two of the main traditions in psychoanalytic history is that not working okay so i'll just contrast two different traditions within psychological history more or less one tradition which is based on a belief in empathy defined as more or less the capacity to enter into the emotional experience of someone else and to experience the same feelings that another human being has obviously they're different definitions of empathy but that's one that has been central to a particular current in analysis and that current gained prominence in the early 1940s by the mid 1950s it was getting stronger and stronger and today there are many different traditions in the talking therapies which actually base their practice on the idea that the feelings that the analyst has the therapist has when they're in dialogue with a patient are accurate reflections of the internal experiences of the patient and hence crucial point that these can be used as a compass in the clinical work itself so you're using what you feel to guide your work now we can perhaps talk more about that later on but that's really important and in some parts of the world dominant tradition in analytic work the other tradition which starts out really with freud and continues in the freud students starts out with the basic assumption that there's no such thing as empathy that it's both dangerous and in some cases cruel to imagine that we can know anything about the internal world about the emotional states of another person and that what the concept of empathy blocks the person from doing blocks the clinician from doing is actually listening to the patient so it's the idea that rather than assuming that your own feelings are a true guide to what's going on in the patient's mind you have to obliterate that and question it as much as possible put your own feelings in question and rather listen to what the patient is saying and make your deductions and your inferences about their emotions perhaps or their thought processes from speech rather than from what you feel and that's a very very important difference between two traditions in analytic work now on the side of the tradition which believes that we can enter into the emotional states of others many developments some are quite crude and some are quite sophisticated today we have something called theory of mind which i guess we'll probably talk about at some point in the discussion but generally if we want to find a very simple uh well-known example of how it works you can think of the advert the tv advert for mazda cars it's something that they show in the cinemas and on tv a lot where you see a guy loading female mannequins into the back of his car and he drives along and he's obviously enjoying his ride and at the end of his journey he gets out of the car and he takes the mannequins out of the car and miraculously they've all now got erect nipples and you can see that advert as a kind of model of some contemporary theories of empathy basically it's the idea this time gendered that other people will experience the same thing as the driver of the car that they'll get off on what he gets off on also perhaps there's the idea that they become aroused in the same way that he does just as he might have an erection so they have erect nipples so basically what the advert does is show a kind of arrasal of any kind of difference that these these mannequins or what they symbolize might actually not enjoy going in a man's car they might not be turned on by that and blood flow the engorgement of an organ might not actually be an index of arousal for that now if you then turn to some other examples we can take one from the history of psychology in the 60s there were a number of experiments where they showed generally it was high school students or college students a couple of movies one was called sub incision and this was a film in which an anthropologist assists at a ritual ceremony in which a piece of flint is inserted into a penis the control for this film was a documentary about agriculture called corn farmer now it's kind of interesting to think about because as far as i know there are lots and lots and lots of horror movies set on corn farms there's children of the corn there are a lot of movies where people find themselves in a corn field and all sorts of terrible things happen they're very few films in which people find themselves subject to a ritual of flint insertion anyway what they found in one of these experiments was that when the subjects were instructed to empathize with the anthropologist who was assisting on the ritual the distress was tempered in other words the empathy blocked the experience or one aspect of the traumatic experience for them whereas for those subjects who weren't instructed to empathize with the anthropologist things were a bit more difficult so that can suggest to us with that particular idea of empathy that the effort to put oneself in someone else's place can act as a defense against thinking about some more painful aspects of our existence another example from popular culture i don't know if you've seen the disney film brave it's a very good film about the mother daughter relation and in this film you have the daughter in a royal family in scotland whose mother wants her to be a kind of perfect princess and marry a prince and link the two families dynastically she's not so interested in that she manages to get her mother turned into a bear and a lot of the film concerns the relation of this daughter to the bear she wants the mother change back from the bear into her mom but at the same time in the scenes where the daughter and the mother are together there's always a margin of tariff for her of whether the bear will see her as an edible morsel to be devoured or whether the mother will see her as her daughter and a lot of the drama of the film revolves around that terrifying ambiguity not knowing what she is for the other and from a psychological perspective this is one of the fundamental questions that infants have to confront in their lives in their early existence the question of what are they for the other and one of the ways arguably that we block out that terrible question is through an appeal to processes involving empathy where we imagine we know what someone else is feeling just as in this film what's actually tempering for the girl is to imagine that her mother wants her to be a princess who marries a prince to join their dynasties rather than being simply a morsel of food to be devoured you can imagine that's less traumatic to imagine that you have a place in a symbolic universe rather than more on the side of a real object that's going to be eaten so the analytic idea would be that the idea of empathy is something that blocks out the traumatic dimension of asking of posing the question of what we are for the other again it's interesting to look at the the gender questions here because one could one could guess in fact that this is something that women are much more alert to and open to than men men tend to deny the dimension of the desire of the other they tend to remove that question from their lives whereas many women talk about how open the question is of what their value is for the other what they represent what they are for someone else for the other or whatever embodies the other for them i think that when we look at some of the theories the analytic theories from the first tradition that actually do buy into the concept of empathy we see a very very naive view the idea that we kind of move up a developmental ladder by recognizing the fact that other people our caregivers have got mental states which are different from our own and that gradually that allows us to form our own sense of self gain and access to some notion of a shared reality when if you think about your own experience let's say people who've been married for decades perhaps there'll be plenty of cases where it's absolutely clear that each party has got no belief that their partner has a mental state that's different from their own because people tend to believe that other people think like they do even if on paper they'll be lip service to the idea that we recognize difference that other people think differently from us in practice we find the opposite that people do their best to ignore or deny or blot out the fact that other people have got belief systems different from their own so to conclude we can just say that from analytic perspectives the concept of empathy is more or less a defense or diversion what's much more interesting is to open up the question of different modes of identification different ways involving both the mind and the body in which we put ourselves in the place of other people sometimes at an emotional level sometimes at other levels and to look at the different forms of identification that are at play in development and in human relations and to study those rather than follow what seems to be a very very far-fetched idea that we can ever know anything for sure about what someone else is feeling thank you [Applause] thank you yes you just heard about a more naive version of psychoanalysis now i'm going to tell you something really vague but i want to start at the beginning because i was also supposed to discover how recently the word empathy came into the english language and of course wikipedia is very useful for this so my story was first used by vernon lee in 1904 and she wanted it to describe her psychological theory of aesthetic experiences she should believe that when people are looking at works of art memories and associations are called up which are accompanied by changes in bodily posture and breathing which are often unconscious but what i particularly like about vernon lisa she was a before her time an experimental psychologist so she actually tried to measure these fantastic responses she went around art girl as her friend kit and strawberry thompson and tried to observe the changes in posture and breathing elicited by the works of art so of course a hundred years later when i started being interested in this verbally was loudly forgotten when neuroscientists started doing exactly the same thing or very much the same thing but this time using extremely expensive equipment and instead of learning we were inspired by the discovery of mirror neurons at the end of the 20th century as you probably know about so in the major cortex of the monkey and humans for that matter there are neurons with fire and the animal makes a particular gesture so one neuron found this gesture and another one like that and jackie moritz is asking his friends in palmer found by serendipity that some of these neurons also fire when the monkey sees the experiment of making the same action so the neuron fires when the monkey picked up a peanut it also found when the monkeys used to experiment with and very soon after that everybody was using brain imaging to share the same effects in humans so when you look at somebody moving there is actually activity in that part of your brain which you use when making those same movements although you don't actually move like fiona was describing scandals in their arms but you might call this motor contagion acts rather than empathy and this contagion does actually spill over into behavior so watching somebody else move will interfere with your moving if i'm trying to move like this and i see somebody else moving like this this movement becomes more varied and of course it's not just movements and this happens for it also happens with sensations so for example my friend jamie ward who's an expert on synesthesia discovered a new kind of synesthesia not long ago where people when they see someone's face being touched they say i feel the touch on my own face there might even be one or two people here tonight with this sort of experience and this sounded ideal for a scanning experiment because you could ask the question does the bit of the cortex that lights up when they are touched also light up when they see somebody else being touched and this is exactly what we found primarily in secondary semester sensory cortex to be use the jargon were activated when the volunteer was touched and also when he saw somebody else being touched in the same place so face versus neck or left versus right would activate a different bits of the touch sensitive cortex and this is what we found as expected in the synesthetes but the surprise was that we found exactly the same thing in the controls as well so it looks as if we all unconsciously are mirroring the sensations of others when we watch them but probably the most relevant thing for empathy of course is studies of pain so there are now lots of studies showing that we mirror pain and the one that i did with tanya singer the volunteer laying the scanner while her friend was sitting next to her outside the scanner they were both wired up to receive painful shocks and arrows on the screen in front of the volunteer indicate when the shocks would be received and by whom and so as you might expect when the volunteer receives a shock or sees the arrow indicating the shock is coming there's a big response in the areas of the brain concerned with emotion and pain but in fact the responses in these areas was equally strong when the arrow indicated that their friend would receive the shock and you can get the same results other people's shame the same thing you get you get a response when you see a fear an expression of pain in the face in front of you and i mean it's almost obvious that you get an experience of pain when you see a picture of someone with a needle being stuck into their hand you wind so not surprisingly appears in your brain as well and we like to call this an empathic response and it seems very similar to the sorts of things that vernon lee is talking about these are automatic unconscious responses to seeing something out there but as i said before it might be better to call it contagion these responses occur very rapidly and they can occur without awareness you have a fearful response or you see a fearful faithful expression but you get this response even if the fearful facial expression is presented so briefly that you're not actually aware of seeing it and there are some situations where you can show physiologically the person is responding in a fear or pain or whatever it may be without actually being consciously aware that this is happening now these rapid unconscious responses can be very important to survival the fearful face is a signal that there's something to be afraid of our fearful response to that face prepares us to run away and likewise a disgusted facial expression is a signal of contaminated food and our disgusted response to this facial expression prepares us to spit out the food and there's actually another advantage of mirroring perhaps a more interesting one which applies to all these different kinds of mirroring sensations actions emotions because when we mirror someone we become actually more similar to them when this makes communication and cooperation in joint tasks easier and even there's an experiment claiming if you imitate the foreign accent of the person talking to you they will understand you better i wouldn't try it but it's fairly well established that if you mirror someone super surreptitiously while they're talking to you they will think you are a nicer person and they may even give more money to charity afterwards the problem here is of course if they notice that you're imitating them the effect completely reverses and they think that you're just creepy but as we heard in the previous talk empathy has really become to mean more than just emotional contagion we expect the empathic person to be aware that they're responding to the emotion of the other and also we expect them in some cases to respond appropriately to the motion of the other and i think this creates a major problem for these mechanisms of contagion that i've been telling you about we might feel angry when confronted with an angry face but is this appropriate should we feel afraid and in particular if you're it's very difficult when confronted with an unhappy face not to feel unhappy but this is probably the worst thing if you want to actually cheer the person up so they're undoubtedly high-level processes in the brain that control these contagious emotional responses as we're hearing in the last talk which are very important but at the moment neuroscientists at least know very little about them but my conclusion for the moment is nevertheless there's a very important role for happy people with no [Applause] empathy thank you very much for three fascinating talks i think i'd like to start by asking um fiona and darion to maybe respond to mirror neurons and tell us if if you feel they're a sort of convincing account of what goes on um in the in the clinical or the um theatrical situation maybe fiona well speaking about them i just thought you know i suppose the whole cultural industry of performance is based on that notion and presumably you know when most western males and the planets see brad pitt doing something he's doing it not only on their behalf but they're doing it with him and if it's robbing a bank or being jesse james they're jesse james and this identification but i'm not sure identification is the same as empathy actually so maybe you know these gentlemen throw something up but they but certainly the the emotional um uh the emotional fulfillment of watching it isn't just mirroring because there may be a huge feeling afterwards of well-being because you've sort of been jesse james you've sort of been brad pitt i i i'm not sure that his father scott wants to go but that was what i i just thought that actually without some notion of cultural empathy we would have no performance industry of any kind yeah i mean i'd think more about the actor known as clint eastwood does he have feelings and it's interesting i've heard quite a few people over the years express their desire to be like him and there's a whole industry of video games which people buy and use for hours and hours whether an emotionless killer or assassin going through some jungle or town eliminating other people with as little feeling displayed as possible with a kind of absence of signs of emotional expression like the clint eastwood of his of the spaghetti westerns which is still the kind of character that a lot of people identify with apparently someone who doesn't have empty so i'd agree with you there's a difference between identification and empathy i think a lot of people are drawn to the image of someone who doesn't actually experience emotions because it's the aim in many people's lives they expend a huge amount of energy in trying to get rid of any kind of emotional effects as for the question of mirror neurons i think you know there's a great deal of debate about whether these mirror neurons actually exist and what they do if they do exist and are they the product of social interactions and they don't actually from what i understand it doesn't actually tell us very much about the process of identification to say that we see a firing in these particular parts of the brain what's interesting from the developmental research is the idea that some of the first forms of motor identification take place at the time that the infant experiences its greatest distress and this was studied by scandinavian and then french researchers in the 1920s and 30s the idea that in the state of motor in coordination of the first few months of life children will be drawn towards images that seem to offer the promise of wholeness and completeness often at a motor level of basically images that present a form of what they are themselves unable to do so this form comes from the other it could come from a caregiver a parent it could come from another child and it was studied in in those years very very carefully the ways in which children would identify in two main periods between three and six months and then between 18 and 24 months the idea that there'll be a fascination and a capture in reflecting surfaces either glass or mirror but also the reflecting surface formed by the eye of a caregiver or by the whole image presented by another person and baldwin james baldwin who studied some of these things one of the first researchers said that for him this gave the birth of the human ego which was simultaneously the birth of the alter ego to the extent that were alienated in an image that comes from the outside we become an image that is not ourselves and that was used to explain some of the interesting questions to do with spatial symmetry and the acquisition of handedness at the time what's interesting is to see how that then develops in that second phase 18 to 24 months the idea that it's less the capture in the whole image or the reflecting surface but rather how that's perceived by a third party the important changes were studied by the researchers what happens to your relation to the mirror image or the image of your body form when there's someone else holding you or there's someone else looking there has to be a kind of sanctioning of your image your image has to be given to you you have to be soldered to your image which brings in the whole question of the subjectivity of one's carers so you have this very very interesting sequence which starts off with an infant's experience of fragmentation or lack of coordination basically a lack an aspiration towards an image an image is incorporated and identified with to give the the form of the human body unfortunately what gives you your unity is also what takes it away because it's an image which is outside yourself and then last moment when that image is symbolized represented pinned down linked to you by the words the actions the love coming from the caregiver and at all all those different moments there can be different vicissitudes depending on the situation of each individual infant which opened up a lot of fascinating questions about phenomena linked to identification that we see later on in life perhaps like fiona's experience in the brain scanner to do with her arms the difference between the body schema and the body image also phenomena where people's image is experienced as being separated from themselves all the strange many strange experiences of the body that neurologists have taught us about can i just before you yeah should go to be i something about that when you talk about clint eastwood having no feelings or seeming to have no feelings i think there's a funny thing at play there which is that the person looking at him is identifying with the fact that he appears not to have feelings but he probably does and they're probably the same hidden feelings that i the viewer i'm having the baby and the baby mirroring i'm just trying to find an example but when you know when you're little and and you have people going isn't she a lovely little girl and you look at them and you you remember thinking what are they talking about you're both pleasure receiving pleasure from the you know from the approbation of isn't she in love with a girl you genuinely don't know what they're talking about but it seems to give them pleasure to say it and is that what you're saying i mean not exactly but because but that's it and so you wave back and go yes i am a lovely little girl but you should not be at all but you have no notion one way or the other but then your identity is split between those two poles between what other people have said about you the lovely little girl and your own refusal of those things that come from outside and has neuroscience got anything to offer in there not on the last point but going back to clint eastwood there was this very interesting experiment done by a russian filmmaker in the 20s shop effect where he took a russian movie star who was a bit like clint eastwood i think and he had and he used the montage effects that they were very keen on so he cut this face into different contexts so you saw the face and then you saw about a soup and you saw the face and then you see a coffin with a young girl in it you know you can find this on youtube and the results are very striking that the people who watch this would say yes isn't he marvelous with minimal changes in his expression he can illustrate the feelings that go over these contexts and of course the point was that there's an identical shot in every case and we've replicated this in the scanner i mean there's really no point because we could exactly the same result but the i mean it shows again this is sort of the other way around how much what we read in other people's expressions depends on what we expect given the context and what we know about is it is empathy a sort of narcissism then actually that it is if i believe that i feel what the other person's feeling but actually i'm just feeling it which is quite a flaw with you with the experiment and there's the other i mean what i always think very cynically is this idea that when you see someone in pain you want to help them you want to stop them being in pain but possibly the reason is because it's so painful for you that would be a very cynical version and there's even a nice experiment where they had some it's a typical social psychology experiment so it's fake the person comes into a waiting room a day is filmed unbeknown to them while two research students come in carrying a tv set and one of them proceeds to drop it with his foot and they they look at the expression of the person in the room and they show an ex you know simply on empathy or whatever they show an expression of pain when the person drops it on their foot but they show an even bigger expression of pain when the person who drops it on their foot is looking at them at the time so is this to say i am very simple yes exactly and it's interesting as well that in some of those experiments the physiological indices that are supposedly linked to empathy go down after the point of the helping behavior which might imply that the physiological indices of the empathy were actually in disease of guilt or relief not to be that person yeah or enjoyment of their suffering yes actually because i was getting ready for this i was talking to somebody on the telephone about this this morning and i was saying when i go into work at night i have to play opposition actor and he's going through a bit of a bad time i say how are things he goes not good i go oh never mind and we get on with it and then we play these parts where we are very very empathetic to each other as characters i have to cauterize my natural feeling for that man in order for us to do this other thing together which is to dance a dance of empathy but i do cauterize it quite completely i am not otherwise i couldn't get on and do the play with him i think you you hit the never your comment about denise that the identification isn't with the absence of emotion but with the tension between the surface absence of emotion and the emotion that will be there yeah can we maybe take fiona's image of the dance and think about bodies and empathy because it seems to me that a lot of the neuroscientific work sort of begins with the body and then and goes from that to the mind chris says in his book we know a lot about what is in the minds of others by simply observing the way they act upon the world by the way they move and it struck me reading that that a lot of um the process of acting must start with imitating the physical um movements of how you see of how you see a character or with sort of getting or maybe not maybe if it comes from the line how do bodies and minds work we can't describe each other we're not there to describe each other that's not what we're trying to do that would be called mimicking and that has absolutely no feeling in it in fact comedy in general mimicry in comedy is a very cold form of communication to gain i don't know pleasure or cause pressure and others that reflects well on yourself it really is the opposite of what i think acting and empathy would be about because our behavior patterns are so defined by our childhoods by our inherited tendencies um i have a nephew who lives in france and he he has some gestures that have the same as mine so they must be inherited through a different track other than mimetic so it would be foolish if we were just trying to take the action of somebody else on the contrary one is trying to reveal something about yourself whilst believing that you are identifying with another person and oddly it's this synthesis of yourself and the notion of the other person that produces when it's successful something that a very very astute audience because we're all astute watching each other believe or can choose to believe and so where do the gestures because each character does have a different way of walking or a different way of gesturing with where does that come from well you know michael bryant who played rashi in the in the um in the wind of the willows some years ago at the national he said i think ratty's a guy awfully like me i don't think that's quite true because of course a lot of very bad students say i think hamlet's a guy like me and you think no hamlet's huge you're tiny and your job is to sort of reach beyond yourself to expand your mind to what is that hamlet but whether hamlet walks or talks similarly to you is probably the case that he does the reason why actors train at all is to enhance their ability to play and be in charge of a wider range of mannerisms that will be defined by the locality or their family mannerisms that's really all they're doing and sometimes they do it to a fault so they become so neutral and open they actually don't reflect anything particular it's this weird connection between what is unescapable in yourself or inescapable in yourself and and your ability to jump out of yourself and embrace often feelings way beyond your natural disposition or hopefully experience in life that produces a fusion that allows an audience who themselves do not have to experience these terrible things that you're replaying for them but they can believe them enough that they can replay them in their head and learn something from them that seems to me the the the the um the exchange um and sticking with bodies could you tell us maybe about the experiment um is it gonna johansson um the experiment with the with the joints with the lights on the joints i thought that might be now this is just showing that simply the way we move is very informative so what johansen did was he attached lights adding nine lights to all the joints and filmed people moving and then what you see on the screen is just the nine dots and as soon as they start moving you can see what that is a person walking or running and seeing what direction they're going you can see what sex they are you can even see whether they're happy or sad again you can find that on the internet and they even give you a little bath so you can make it be more or less female so it's just showing that we're incredibly attuned to these very minimal types of cues you can remove everything but the movement and you can still see what's going on and we fall in love with that very often we fall in love with the way somebody turns their head for some reason we recognize something in the gesture which is pretty well same with every other in their head but it isn't and would you say any of that comes into acting even even if it's not part of the original process you certainly can't manipulate a hundred or three hundred or a thousand people to to notice the way you turn your head uh usually in a story of course somebody else is falling in love with you while you turn your head in that way and the audience replay that in their own mind okay oh that's like when someone turned their head and i liked it i i i mean it's beckett actually who who really begins to do that more than any other playwright which is rather than describe or prescribe to the audience what they should feel there's a wonderful bit in footfalls where a character says a little later when she was quite forgotten she began to a little later when as though she had never been it never been began to walk at nightfall no obviously the phrasing is tell you a little later she began to then it's paused the audience panic and think why is there a pulse in that pause beckett is allowing you to have whatever feeling you have about her but also to have whatever feeling you have about yourself it's a sort of vacuum it's a sort of freefall out of an airplane without a parachute he stops taking responsibility for what you're feeling and allows you to feel whatever you're feeling yourself i think that's a very useful thing um it's a useful thing but it's it is like the dots in the end it's very hard to change the dots of your behavior and bodies and minds need an identification yeah i mean i just think that there's something very problematic about saying that one can tell by looking at someone whether they're happy or sad because it doesn't the whole of human experience world literature everything tell us that you can't tell when someone is happy or sad sometimes affects compounds sometimes an effect can transform into another effect longing can be transformed into anxiety desire and transformative fear and it seems that we're taking a step back um hundreds of years to say that you know we can study experimentally pain happiness sadness through facial expressions through neuro imaging certainly you can say things about the expression of what culturally some people might agree on but the simple point is made again and again that if there's any link between the experience of an emotion and the expression of emotion since expression of emotion is linked in a communicative matrix to other people then presumably any situation or social context which has an effect on how and when and why we frown or grimace or smile will then have an effect on the emotion from the experience of the emotion very very simple point that's been made dozens of times so once we recognize that there's a difference between culture what's seen culturally as the expression of an emotion like a smiling face we have to recognize that that tells us very very little about any emotional experience that the person is having about com the difference between compound emotions and emotions that supposedly aren't compounded and i mean it just it just seems to me that it's very very far-fetched to think that there are separate things like disgust pain fear happiness sadness that you can find in the brain so this is very much the sort of thing that the professor of english says in christmas books so i'm sure he's got a ready answer well i deliberately choose fear and disgust with the idea that these are particularly basic emotions which are more resistant to cultural effects and there's a very interesting work on what the expressing fear of disgust actually does to your face so fear you widen the eyes but how do you know that's fear well no i mean okay this expression the expression that widens the eyes actually increases your visual field so you're more able to see what's happening whether there's some predator or something disgust and then i think this is a particularly good use of imaging if you image someone while they're showing an expression of disgust you find that their nasal is contracted that's what the wrinkling does your eyes close down and this again is a way of keeping out nasty things nasty smells nasty sights so this is i thought this is very interesting this is a very basic technique of changing your face in response to certain kinds of different kinds of environmental threat and that's why it's a very useful signal for other people to recognize and indeed to imitate but i would entirely agree that more complex emotional expressions will be different will have cultural overlays but that still won't deter me from trying to study fear and disgust they're not simple things are incredibly complicated and if you want to know something about disgust if you listen to what people who have what are called culturally eating disorders have to say about their experiences you'll find that they're not simple things that can be determined by a facial expression or by activity of the sympathetic nervous system i mean it just seems to me it's like it's just mythology to think that we can segregate these different basic feelings and study them experimentally rather you have to listen to someone talk for a hell of a long time to have an idea of what exactly it is they mean or when they actually have those those feelings wouldn't you say that most people are roughly the same are pretty unhappy and pretty happy during most part of their lives and that empathy is the bit of is the area where someone for some unknown reason is able to not read the obvious signal of whatever the person is giving but is able to read the person behind the signal they're giving and that that is why we're impressed by our own sense of empathy uh you can easily tell if somebody's disgusted or frightened but most people well you can tell they're fine a lot of people live in pretty well permanent fear and it's either you know the whole the whole of great britain when you get off an airplane at heathrow i feel the whole country's in fear you see a tight-lipped country you don't see that in spain and people in england look frightened all the time so of course it would be rather you know simplistic to say well the whole english is frightened but they do look frightening they're tense they go what you know they're short they're kept there's a whole cultural area of that behavior which is i'm being you know crewed with it but you much more difficult for me to tell whether an italian was frightened or not because they are more relaxed culturally or tenderly and i think but when you see the individual and uh you're at a party or which is maybe butch near the idea of falling in love which is at its beginning empathy doesn't it is that you can see the person behind the person or whether the word seeing is wrong you feel the person behind the person fall out of love well if you're drawn to somebody that's when you really feel you you sense their feeling whether they're happy or unhappy and for some reason it gives you pleasure even if they're unhappy are you saying weird it's not how i'd say it people fall in love in many different ways and people can only realize many years later after they've stopped seeing someone that they actually love them yes well maybe love is too extreme a thing but if you've been a group of people there are some people who one feels drawn to and some people you're not they're none the better no worse people some in a group you know i often have to meet a group of 15 new people and i immediately know the people i'm drawn to what is it well i'm wondering i mean i'm asking because it's not sexual attraction it's not it's not any of those things it's just i feel i can feel their rhythm because it's called being on the same wavelength all sorts of things like that man and i think you know but that is the area of empathy i would have thought rather than whether we can detect whether they're i'm certainly optimistic that people are actually most of the time quite good at communicating with each other rather than being horrendously difficult is that you do not know the state of somebody i mean you do sometimes hear a terrible story having known someone for quite a while and you had no clue that that was the story and i think fiona's point is that often the moment of empathy is that you're empathizing with something that wouldn't show up in a brain that there's but it's that you see the fear and that that's the sort of vision thing but there's also behind that empathy presumably the brain is involved somehow tell us about how the brain can do many things at once well i can certainly do many things at once but i'm just trying to make the point that if we didn't have a brain that's all i'm saying i mean i perfectly agree that we our understanding of the brain is about 100 or something like that but it's all going on in there and eventually more and more relationships will be found at the moment our theories are just not good enough would you say they'll never be found no i've got um i've got some sympathy with with good research but i just think it's just mickey mouse stuff to think you can isolate these different feelings through neuroimaging you need a much more sophisticated modelling it says if you look back to early 20th century research in experimental psychology loads and layers of this stuff has been disproved you know by either by people working in germany and in america in those early years and all those refutations or most of them have been forgotten if you look back through the medical journals take something like the role of the hypothalamus and the regulation of emotion fantastic work refuting misconceptions about that in the 1930s and all those misconceptions are back on the map today so i just find it extraordinary how faculty psychology which is essentially what we've been hearing about that you can you know you get someone to plunge their hand into a bucket of cold water and we can study what's going on in the brain because that's an experience of pain or threaten someone with an electric shock and that will tell us about fear these things you know were kind of you know just seen as absolutely absurd all that time ago and now they're treated as cutting edge science we have a raving microphone um here and the question here and here well i i want to see if i can somehow bring the the two males on the panel slightly closer together but simply by asking whether if at chris prith's end um there's a sense that the model that's in question is is somehow linked to an animal model um a human is is an animal in that sense and not an animal that speaks necessarily and therefore has very very little of that complexity that comes into being with language and at your end darian it seems to me that without language we we don't have quite the the um the huge amount of complexity in the being that that one is talking about so that it's as if you know at one end we're really talking about the human as animal um you know disgust in the way that it's portrayed in in what we're talking about animal psychology um and fear when we're talking about animal psychology is really what's at play here and when you use the word disgust and fear you're talking about all the things that come through human development language and culture to actually approach them now that is inevitably going to be far more complicated and our brain studies it seems to me are still at a very um basic level i mean at the level in which humans are animals and have not yet entered into language and what what what where the language comes in is the way in which psychologists then describe the nature of their experiments and that makes them seem as if they're dealing with a far more complicated being now i i just put that to you because i want to throw it into the discussion yeah i mean certainly from my point of view we would a good model from my point of view is one of the human is one that is consistent with what we know about the animals in a sense we're working from the bottom up and we so when we talk about fear we're thinking very much of the kinds of experiments that have been done in animals and when we talk about the brain most of what we know about the brain actually comes and work with animals rather than humans because you can't do it or at least it's very difficult as yet to look at things like connectivity in the human brain um so that i think that's absolutely right and i try and avoid language because it's much continuous but i have to talk about my life i mean can we could i ask you just about animals and people then of people if people who could communicate with animals is that an empathetic element that somebody who can make a horse move by thought is that the sort of is that i mean this is very i mean that's somewhat controversial um i think yes if you know animals very well i'm sure you understand their behavior and there may be all sorts of things that you're reading without probably quite knowing how you're doing it which will enable you to control them in various ways there's the classic case of trevor hans the horse who could count and this is actually going the other way this is the animals reading humans and everybody believes that this horse could actually count until it was studied very closely by experimental psychologist who found the trainer was unconsciously giving signals that the horse knew to stop so that was the case of where the horse had trained the owner yeah lisa i mean i think that some studies of animals are much more subtle and more sophisticated than studies of humans and i don't think that you know it's that the research itself is so primitive or that we don't have techniques that would allow good researchers that some of the basic paradigms that are used in the research are childish you know things that you wouldn't you know you wouldn't be able to get through a gcse exam on i mean take dimacio's work for example which is seen as kind of you know it's got a very good reputation in in that field and when you look at what he has to say about language about notions of the self and so on that stuff you know you wouldn't get a gcse if you were putting forward those arguments so it seems we've got there's just a gulf that's developed between different research fields that you have those disciplines which look at what you call language representational systems social constructivism and so on which show the way in which our experiences our emotions our ways of communicating or failing to communicate are linked to the way in which were grasped by language and then you have the other disciplines which pay very very little attention to that and it doesn't have to be that way i mean there's some some very good studies of animals which use those paradigms which have sophisticated models of how language works so i think a lot of attention has got to be paid to the basic philosophical ideas that are imported into [Music] theories about empathy and about thinking and emotion but would you say there are pre-linguistic experiences that that can be thought about in these terms when you say thought about you mean language do pre-linguistic experiences exist no doubt yeah not everything is language but could they therefore be more instinctual and and therefore fit more into the model that chris is putting forward well maybe they could be but i don't think chris is really saying that because i think chris recognizes the importance of language in social interaction yes absolutely i'm a bit i certainly wouldn't have anything to say about demacia where there's just more attention paid to the philosophical presuppositions of the experimenters that rather than let's say assuming that when a dog has bristling hair when it's about to meet a rival rather than assuming that the dog feels threatened or the dog is being aggressive there's careful attention paid to the possibility that the dog is actually pretending to be frightened or pretending to be aggressive in order to gauge the reaction of the other just just stuff like that um my feeling is that actually fiona when you started talking about in the movement of a head someone can fall in love and there was something you said in the next email i can't remember exactly what it was but it touched on the emotion that someone is feeling and not showing and i think that's what we're starting to get to now and for me a lot of what had been spoken about before was more about projection and identification and not about true empathy and i think true empathy come from from what you said it hit me there is seeing the feeling that isn't show and the connection and perhaps for me that is true but the question i have is if anyone agrees with that um how the sort of turn of the head thing how how are we so affected by this do we have the freedom to fall in love in our own way when we've seen so many people fall in love on tv and in films and things like that have we lost the ability to fall in love with people who aren't marilyn monroe thankfully most people don't try and form that with marilyn monroe or her or a prototype i mean they don't most people don't and there may be a bit like the dog pretending to bristle there's an element where a lot of men have to believe that mary monroe is it when in fact they much prefer their wife who's dark-haired and doesn't in any way do that but if she did turn her head yes she could turn ahead and she could turn her own head and no i was going to just say something that maybe that might connect with that but is the opposite thing which is that there are also language inherited systems that we learned of course in shakespeare in shakespeare a lot of things are on the iambic pentameter to tell them to tell them to tell them to come to tell them but every now and then quite subconsciously shakespeare reverses them and they go chomp tea time tea time tea dumpty and notably the beginning of macbeth is instead of determined to tempt when shall we three meet again so it's time t when she meets me again in thunder lightning on rain when the harley bird is down when the bath is off to one that will be our set of sun where the place upon the heath they are to meet with macbeth ferris fowler and foreign filthy air so it's interesting that witches would choose to not speak on the iambic but speak on the opposite rhythm now that's both linguistic and actually not linguistic because nobody in the audience would know that the other thing is the word macbeth doesn't scan now whether there's a pre-linguistic way of that being the case when we like somebody or don't like them in a room i think interests me we just do the head turn much more beyond the head turn is after the head turns and it settles again that's also having an effect in you the way they pick up a tea cup or don't is is a bit like that is that there seems to be i shouldn't double you i'm saying this a sort of conceptual framework of things that we like and don't like individually and when we recognize them we recognize them and in shakespeare notably in the plays people who fall in love very rarely speak to each other at all until after they've fallen in love he never ever tries to say why they fall in love they just fall in love and i think the the word pretend um is also very significant because it feels it seems to me that a lot of the complexity comes from a self-consciousness that we have as humans and um a way in which we are aware of what other people are thinking we're aware of what we want other people to think of us but what i where i think we really experience the empathetic response is when someone can see beyond that and think i know you're not really what you're what you're what you're putting across you're something else you're something deeper and whether the empathy actually is the other person completely understanding or whether what we fall in love with or what we feel drawn to is just that person seeing that we're deeper than what other people might read externally and i think that that's and i think that goes with the baby and mother relationship as well that the baby wants to be second guessed the baby doesn't just want the assumption that when it cries then it needs to be fed or its nappy needs to be changed it needs it wants to for someone to think there's something else you know that they might not even know what it is but just the idea that somebody might get that there's something beyond what can be measured scientifically or what can be read from the external um and i think you know that is what we fall in love with when we fall in love with people is just someone seeing or imagining that there's something deeper which gives us a deeper sense of ourselves and that's a very attractive thing to be connected to whether you ever really feel understood by the person you're in love with i think is still very much in question but you're with someone who's willing to believe there's something more there then and i think that is the same that happens in acting that the that the the audience um gets that whatever the text is being spoken there's something beneath that and that's the excitement that the actor and the audience can have together that whatever i'm saying whatever the the playwright has written that there's something more to be known about the character yes that i'm playing recently bruno gans the great german actor played hitler and it is a fantastic performance because there would be no learning or experience if one just came with no one's reservations about hitler nor does he try and justify hitler he merely placed him but bruno gans is a man with a huge soul if once a large is a word like that he does he's a remarkable person so to have this sort of lake of sorrow which is what bruno is in life actually a sort of he's just a particularly beautiful sorrowful he's not mortal man because he laughs a lot playing hitler is a fantastic experience for the audience because you get to meet i'm sure he's much more sympathetic than hitler might have been had you had you met hitler it is exactly what you said you have this profound depth of human consciousness meeting the behavioral pattern of the band called hitler and therefore the film is very successful because against your better judgment you are sympathetic to that person as he goes through his terrible actions and at the end of it you understand something um maybe just before that i would could this relate to sort of the psychoanalytic encounters well yeah i mean it's a great example because it shows that with a great performance there's that margin that enigmatic margin which means that you have to ask questions about a character rather than assuming that we understand it it's exactly the same in in analytic work that the clinician has to at a certain point start to embody an enigma for the patient so the patient can engage once again with that question what does the other want well what am i for the other and then hopefully you'll have some kind of access to how the response to that question had crystallized for them in their childhood so yeah absolutely so it's always about keeping a margin of non-comprehension active yeah um not really sure you've said a lot not in an offensive way but i'm reminded of like frank jackson's um kind of thought experiment about a person who's looked in a room with a scientist who studies everything about red but has never seen the color red mary say about yes at all because you seem to be talking about something about identifying behavior and i'm not sure well i think the colorblind mary they'll marry the calisthenicist or anyone mary the calisthenics story is particularly about qualia so the idea is that you can know everything about the neural mechanisms of color perception but you wouldn't know what it was like to experience color and i guess i would perfectly agree that i could know everything about how we respond how the brain mechanisms for some sort of emotional responses but that wouldn't tell me what it's like and i would agree with that entirely but it might tell me enabling me to predict to some extent behavior and i personally i think that's where language and culture comes in because the way we know what it's like is actually some sort of construct that we build up through our upbringing through discussions with others through history through reading novels and whatever it may be and that's that's a different story so i agree because i'm not telling you what it's like to be fearful yep but in the end at the bottom i mean the purpose of pain for the animal in us is to avoid hurt and to take consequences of that and you can and that could happen at an entirely non-linguistic level and without any qualia so there's a sort of basis to it at least in relation to pain but when we talk about it yes that becomes another matter yeah i just wanted to build on that last point um about culture that you mentioned and um i wondered what any of you thought about the work of stephen pinker in the better angels of our nature working building on the work of peter singer this idea that maybe human beings have become more empathetic because of um because of text because of theater because of film the idea that having the ability to to read about the way other people think and give has extended the tribe so we don't just care about the immediate family we start to care about other social groups is there any truth in this or is this just wishful thinking yeah and then maybe fiona is because it's theater music i i have to say i have not read the book i'm also somewhat optimistic and to describe another of these naive experiments the when the empathic response to pain that i talked about what i didn't mention is the dark side of this is that you if you there's an experiment done in china where you see a chinese person having a needle stuck into them or a caucasian person having a needle stuck into them and the volunteers are chinese all caucasian and as you might expect the caucasians respond to needles being stuck into caucasians and the chinese respond to needles being stuck into chinese people so there's a very much an in-group out-group effect but you can overcome this of course by enlarging the size of the in-group and i think that might be what you were describing so if you have someone in your team from a different race then you start showing this very what i call an empathic response so i i believe that it's possible that we can enlarge the size of the in-group as it were so this goes in globalization isn't that another name for that genocide animals wearing clothes making sounds with their mouths yeah yeah exactly yeah um i need to catch up with the genocide just you just the idea that you can enlarge the size of an in group what does that mean well i mean that's i mean london the success of london is that people who would have found each other intolerable 40 years ago seem to be completely added to the other now whether we're empathetic to each other we're certainly neutral about each other whether that's without his empathy but when you trump you really think people are neutral today i think pretty neutral i think it's amazing how people live in the city uh all together and we don't kill each other it's phenomenal i think it's i think it's wonderful but i i would have just said that culture or plays or theater or films or whatever the the watching of other people whether it's eastward whoever's behavior you're watching it might teach you something the purpose of tragedy they say is that when you experience tragedy outside yourself it does free you from the expectation that your life will not be tragic all our lives are tragic because they will all end in our death and in 100 years time none of us who are being born today or existing will exist it's it is a really sad thing it's very sad um so there is a inbuilt tragedy maybe an authority in terms of what is going to happen to us but i actually think i don't think of it in terms of tribal groups but the point of looking at someone on a stage or in a film or in a book or a novel usually the novel can be placed in another planet even is that you learn something about the infinite universe that's inside your head that's where i think the empathy is self-referential in a way that the more you know or experience of the human condition the more you get a chance to be the person who's had a bigger experience of the human condition without getting hurt physically and that seems to be a good thing but i'm not sure it makes you a nicer person i know many very well-read people who are horrible people and many writers who are horrible people and none of us seem to have any ability when it's to our own behavior to view it we seem incapable of seeing ourselves but yet the attempt to do that seems to be what culture is i think well i think on that note i hope that this hour and a half has has in a minor way extended all our um sympathies and empathetic capabilities and i'm sure a glass of wine will add to the experience so um i'd like to thank our three marvelous speakers [Applause] [Music] do [Music] [Music] you

Channel: poppy sebag-montefiore

Views: 10,933

Keywords: Empathy (Character Power), Brain (Literature Subject), Neuroscience (School/tradition), Psychoanalysis (Medical Specialty), Actor (Profession), fiona shaw, psychology, Love (Quotation Addressee), William Shakespeare (Author), Mirror Neuron (Literature Subject), Conversation (Quotation Subject), Medicine (Field Of Study), Mind, Body

Id: VF7hG0S1dAw

Length: 90min 52sec (5452 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 08 2013