The Neuroscience of Empathy | Thomas Lewis | Talks at Google

well thank you all for coming and welcome to another author at Google event we are very fortunate to have Dr Thomas Lewis here with us today Dr Lewis is an assistant clinical professor in the department of Psychiatry at the U UCSF school of medicine and professor at the FR Institute at USF he has lectured on a broad range of topics related to psychopharmacology and psychobiology among the courses he has taught at UCSF are the neuroscience and poetry of emotional experience and the Neuroscience of morality he has given he has even consulted with major Motion Picture Productions and the California Shakespeare Festival on the science of emotion and its role in the dramatic arts he is the author of a general theory of love where in his preface he writes now he wrote this this book as it elucidates the shaping power of Parental devotion the biological reality of Romance the healing force of communal connection argues for love Turn the Page and the arrow is loosed the heart it seeks is your own he is here today to talk about his recent work on the Neuroscience of empathy please welcome Dr leis thanks very much how do I get the little preview thing off there does anybody know the um there we go okay well thanks um I'm very happy to be part of your Google author series and I'm very happy to come here as a writer but more importantly as a Google shareholder um having been a physician and a writer and a Google shareholder I can tell you that the last of those three is vastly more profitable than either of the other ones so keep up the good work if only for my sake um so I am Tom Lewis I'm one of the authors of a general theory of Love along with Dr farini and Dr Richard Lannon and um today we'll be talking about the Neuroscience of empathy and I'll be showing you some research into that area most of which uh postat I think 200000 so it's all uh pretty recent stuff so let me just tell you the landscape of what we'll be talking about today first we'll start off talking about Evolution a little bit and we'll talk about where the brain comes from in the first place which helps us understand why empathy exists at all then we'll turn our attention to the brain and we'll look at three different mechanisms of empathy and the Brain locations they arise from a mechanism of modeling other people's behavior of projection of self-image and adjusting the balance between self and other so that's the map of where we're headed today if anything I say starts to not make sense let me know uh so that I can correct it and then we'll have some time at the end for more general questions um one of the things I noticed when I was making up this slide is that for those whose Minds run to such things the map is a virtual anagram for the word empath and um if we look at the word actually I like looking at word origins it may tell us something about the phenomenon um empathy the word comes from M the root meaning in and then path which means feeling or sorrow or suffering uh the same kind of word that shows up nowadays in pathology or pathetic so that empathy as a word means into the sorrow or into the suffering feeling of somebody else and we'll look at how that how our brain allows us to do that how it allows us to feel the suffering and distress of other people so first just a word about evolution in the brain um this is the brain that we have now looking at it from the side and if we look at an MRI this is a A sagittal section A sagittal from the from the Latin word meaning Arrow just like Sagittarius the Archer so this is if an arrow just split your head in two and then you looked at it from the side That's A sagittal section so where did this come from and why does it look the way that it does I'll show you a uh a brief model that um may be mildly simplistic but it'll serve our needs and um the planet itself here is about 4 billion years old and life on the planet shows up about a billion years into the history of the planet um in the study of empathy then nothing else happens for a long time right up until almost the present day so if we go back say to 300 million years ago the earth looked like this and animals like this were on the planet for instance at that time uh almost unchanged from the way that we would find them in the oans today and essentially what we can see is that this animal is a is a hollow tube ringed with teeth there really is not that much of this animal except eating and then things passing out the other end uh now eventually these large fish grew legs and they crawled out onto the land is also a very ancient animal here and then about 265 million years ago this would be the age of the reptiles or the dinosaurs so that animals like this giant lizards walked the Earth some of them this is a a Komodo dragon that you can still find on the Earth today giant lizard and then some of these rapes became very very large and I'll show you just a little bit about what life was like at that [Music] time so there was not a lot of empathy to go around on the planet at that time for a good reason was that reptiles do not have empathy as we'll see because they don't need it um then about 200 million years ago the earth looked like this and mammals evolved split off from The Reptilian line at that time they still look like this little tree living shrews kind of like a tiny Mouse really not much to them and then about 65 million years ago proba the most important thing in the development of empathy happened which was a an asteroid struck the planet my little uh animation doesn't do it justice um so see what it looks like from this view that a gigantic asteroid 1100 feet across struck the planet with unimaginable Force near the Yucatan Peninsula the main problem was not this big Ring of Fire and destruction per se which incinerated everything in its path but the debris which was kicked up into space and then inevitably this massive amount of debris was recaptured by the Earth's gravitational field and came back to the planet in the form of innumerable flaming meteors um essentially what happened is that the entire surface of the planet was carpet bombed as we would say now and incinerated 90% of the biomass of the planet at that time was incinerated 2third of the species on the planet at that time went extinct and after the fires was really the first nuclear winter say that the planet had seen the sky was so dark with Ash that um no difference could be told from day or night for at least months possibly years and so everything that was more than about this big died including the dinosaurs that gave us the chance to move up in the world because they were gone so mammals who were existing at that time then moved into the Gap multiplied into Diversified and so now we live in the age of the mammals instead of the age of the reptiles but really we just owe that to the uh to the asterid here's a an old mammal the ringtailed Lemur and you can see at about 20 million years ago mammals had gotten this far where you can see an aplike thing looking here about three million years ago the common ancestor between human beings and chimpanzees uh arose so that say if you go back 3 million years our ancestor and chimp's ancestor look just like this common ancestors and then the two lines diverged and then we have our own line today and chimps have their line so that's where we come from now the fundamental difference between reptiles and mammals is this for the purpose of the study of empathy reptiles lay eggs that are leathery and self-sufficient and tough and require no care whatsoever so here you see an Australian spiny lizard committing its last Act of Parental devotion which is to lay the eggs and then leave so the parental uh unit is entirely indifferent to the fate of the eggs remaining they don't require any care or nurturance here sea turtles hatch fully instinctually knowledgeable they try to make it to the Sea before they get eaten by Predators there's no one around to help them because the reptilian strategy is to lay tough eggs hope that The Offspring make it and you take your chances so 300 million years ago Planet had only fish and some reptiles then 200 million years ago the mammals arose mammals have a fundamentally different strategy of reproduction so that mammals give birth to live helpless young that require elaborate care or they'll die so that Maman Young have to be protected from the cold for instance they have to be fied around because they're not fully mobile they have to be communicated with at regular intervals so that the parental mammal can figure out what it is that the baby mammal needs they need to be protected from predators they need to be fed they need to be bathed even some alternate methods for bathing even when someone else is feeding them they have to be supervised to make sure that they don't get into trouble and they have to be taught things young mammals learn things from their parents which is not true of reptiles and mammal parent and young most often sleep together something that we won't touch on so much today if we look at the brain and we look at the parts from a comparative neuroanatomical standpoint this part in green is considered the reptilian brain so if you cut apart reptiles and look at their brains they have parts that look very similar to this and in these parts of the brain we can find ancient hardware for making the body run regulating the heart and lung function survival reflexes and so forth then there it is the um [Music] then there we go then when mammals arose we see this part of the brain arising because mammals do things they have qualities and behaviors that reptiles do not like parental uh bonding to the Young Loyalty affiliation parental nurturance and protection and care of the young um so they need new brain parts to carry out those new functions and this part of the brain arises which in this view uh is called the singulate gyus the great French neuroanatomist Paul Brokaw was the person who first realized that this part was a mamalian Innovation and he called it the lyic system and he was using the uh the ancient word limb l i MN which means line that word actually comes from the medieval times when monks copied manuscripts and they would draw things in the borders or outline the manuscripts and the word limb actually comes from Lumen which means light so broa proposed that that this was the line of division in his mind between lower and higher forms of life for our purposes today it also is the light say of empathy emanates from this part and not from this part so here we are with The Reptilian and then the mamalian brain 200 million years ago then just a few million years ago relatively speaking on the African plane we got the most recent part in our brain development in which some monkeys became smarter and smarter and smarter and as they did so then we got this massive neocortex and the neocortex here you see in blue is a part of the brain that makes us smart so it enables us to have things like symbolic representation language logic mathematics physics technology the ability to invent things the ability to imagine things that have not yet happened uh comes from this part of the brain and the real difference then between a monkey and a man is this diameter here which essentially is the diameter of the neocortex so we're very smart monkeys so that's the evolutionary part and now we'll Forge ahead into the first mechanism of empathy which is modeling and uh let me tell you a little bit about that the the study of empathy really has taken off of Neuroscience in the last several years by which I mean perhaps 10 years and it begins with this observation that people are contagious much more contagious than you would suppose so that for instance behavior is contagious this is a highly contagious Behavior if some people begin to do it lots of people begin to do it nearby someone undoubtedly will begin to do it in the next few seconds because this this behavior is so contagious it's contagious in animals it's contageous across animals to us when you see people or animals doing this it's hard not to do it yourself behavior is contagious we see one Behavior spread to another person we think well why is that here's another example of contagious Behavior this is uh Indiana Jones watch the young Alfred Molina behind him uh after Indie reaches for [Music] the ind's behavior is contag he stands there going like this the guy behind him starts doing the same thing why is that we'll see in in a second emotional expressions and emotions are themselves contagious so that people in the presence of someone showing an emotion begin to show the same emotion themselves and they begin to feel congruently with that emotion if you look at this woman for instance it's hard to look at her and not become happier than you were before that's because emotions are contagious so too tone of voice surprisingly enough is contagious people unconsciously mimic the tones of voice that they listen to so that say if we hear a fragment of speech from one of the most famous tones of voice don't be too proud of this technological taror you've constructed the ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the force people who listen to this voice you can actually measure that their own voice becomes deeper after listening say to Darth Vader than it would if they were listening to a high-pitched woman speak tone of voice is contagious Sensations are contagious so this is actually called the do no effect from the film Dr No in which a tarantula crawls up Shan Connor's shoulder and then off onto the pillow a number of people when they watch this clip have an irresistible urge to brush their own shoulder um or they get a creepy feeling like something might be touching their own shoulder because Sensations in of them themselves are contagious why then are people contagious why are behaviors why are emotions why is tone of voice why are Sensations contagious why do they leap from one person to another we can begin to see the answer with this study which looks at what happens to people when they're stuck in the scanner and then their leg is touched here one leg here the other leg and you see the primary and then the secondary samata sensory cortex lighting up and then the important part comes when you put people in the scanner and you show them pictures of other people being touched and what you can see is that the same areas light up in the brain whether you yourself are being touched or whether you are watching someone else being touched what we understand from this and some other subsequent work that I'll show you is that people understand what they're seeing by modeling it in their own brain when you see someone being touched your own brain runs an internal simulation or a model that asks the question what if that were happening to me it uses the same neural Hardware that you would use if you yourself were being touched and that's how you understand what it is that happens to other people sometimes we see that internal model leak out into actual behaviors on part of the Observer that's why Alfred Molina starts to move his fingers because he's running a model of Indiana Jones in his head and it starts to leak out we start to see it here's an Imaging study of people seeing other people having an emotion or having one themselves we find out that both of those things activate this area here in the premotor cortex the part that part of the brain that readies your face to have an expression so that this is how you understand other people's Expressions is your brain runs a model that says well what if my facial muscles were Contracting in that passion then you start to feel what that is and then you yourself know what it is based on the model in your head this is a study in which people are subject to pain a a little uh probe is heated up to an uncomfortable temperature and applied to the calf or people watch someone while they're in the scanner having the same thing done to them what we see is that they both light up this area in the anterior singulate cortex that I showed you earlier this area we know lights up when people are experiencing pain so that whether you watch someone having pain or whether you yourself are being injured or not injured in this study but you're being subject to pain activates the same area that's how you understand other people's pain is by modeling it that's a particularly Vivid study uh from a couple years ago of that entity where one group of people is shown these non-harmful events opening the door cutting the Cucumber sticking the foot here or getting out of the car other people are shown the painful versions getting the hands stuck in the door cutting the finger instead of the Cucumber getting your foot stuck under the door and closing the car door on your foot why is it unpleasant even to look on these pictures it's unpleasant because you're modeling these situations in your own head and that doesn't feel good it feels unpleasant to have a model in your own head in which your foot is shut in the car door that's somewhat unpleasant it's not as unpleasant as having your foot actually shut in the car door but it still is somewhat unpleasant so here we see that people who see these painful events again this area in their anterior singulate cortex that when people are experiencing pain lights up so The Observers are experiencing pain through the modeling of pain that they're observing does that make sense now you remember that uh former President Clinton used to say that he could feel our pain repetitively I myself viewed this claim with the greatest skepticism I must tell you but if he could have done it this is how he would have done it this is the mechanism that he would have modeled it internally in himself now I'll show you a clip here I want you to watch what happens in this clip after the fellow is struck in the groin okay are okay release the meteor release the meteor oh oh oh no way in a god Dam it oh oh guys where to go aole all right hold on but I try and find my balls for God's sakes one two and three okay I'm okay so what do we see here we see that observers of this event guard their own groins after the impact to the other fellow even the woman does it she makes an uncomfortable motion why are they doing this because their brains are running a model in their own head that asks the question well what if I had been struck in the groin and it makes them want to guard it as if they had been struck this is why behavior is contagious that's why this is unpleasant to look at is because your brain runs a simulation that says well what if a needle were stuck through my forearm I suspect this is a Photoshop job actually I got this from the internet but it looks Photoshop to me the um but that's why it's unpleasant to look on as you're running that simulation in your head and events like this are what led Mark Twain long before Neuro Imaging to remark by trying we can easily learn to endure adversity another man's I mean it's somewhat unpleasant to look at other people's adversity because it's modeled in our own head Ralph Waldo erson around the same time also remarked let us treat men and women well treat them as if they were real perhaps they are this is the part right here of your brain that for the purposes of our talk and in a mild simplification generates emotion so this is the part of your brain that models the emotions that other people feel and exhibit and this is the part of your brain which is active when you are interpreting and modeling the emotions of other people around you to make sense of them and to find out what it is they're feeling so that's the modeling function of this portion which is really the anterior temporal lobe this this thing right here this kind of thing thumb like protrusion is the temporal lobe and this is the anterior temporal lobe so these are just some Imaging studies in people who are losing empathy because of a degenerative brain disease and what we see is that their loss of empathy is highly correlated with deterioration in the same region this anterior temporal Lo that models or that produces emotions in you and models emotions in other people similar view here so this might lead us say to the first law of empathy which is that empathy begins with the covert modeling of what other people are doing and experiencing Anton COV the playwright once remarked everything I know about human nature I learned from me and that's what he's talking about that in drawing characters and creating them he used aspects of himself as we all do because in order to understand understand somebody else we're using ourselves as the initial canvas upon which to paint or model somebody else what happens if this doesn't work so well what happens if you have some problem in the temporal lobe that prevents you from modeling other people's emotion what happens is that you become a sociopath so this is an experimental situation in which people are in an emotion generating Paradigm I think it's the fear of being shocked here you see a normal person generating activity in several Bayon areas here's that anterior singulate cortex again up here in a different view this part right here is where emotional information is fed into the cortex this view is the under surface of the brain like we took the brain just flipped it over and looked now you can notice the contrast between this and this see in sociopaths no activation in these emotionally relevant areas none whatsoever this next study is even more Illuminating in this respect similar Paradigm en enous amounts of emotional activation here in the normal person in the sociopathic or Psychopathic person we see nothing so that one of the ways to understand sociopathy is an empathic problem that is caused by the inability to model other people's suffering so the reason that sociopaths are not disturbed by other people's suffering is they cannot model it there's nothing going on in their brain to make other people's suffering unpleasant to them and it isn't generally speaking so let's move on to our next mechanism which is the projection of the point of view in space or self- projection so you send out a little imaginary Scout and look at what the world looks like from a different point of view if people are in the scanner and they're asked to imagine that their bodies are in a different position we find these parts of the brain lighting up if we ask them to imagine that they themselves that the self is in a different physical location in space looking back at their own body this part of the brain lights up and you wouldn't necessarily think we would have to have a part of the brain like this but we do there's a part of your brain that imaginatively is able to project your point of view in space and imagine what other things look like from other parts of space around you including your own body um so this part is the part that's called upon in understanding uh an an EMP thing here's say a guy moving behind a bookcase in this Imaging study elicits no meaningful activation but this scenario exhibits activation in this area which is called the posterior Superior temporal sulcus unfortunately but that's because it's posterior here in the temporal lobe and it's Superior it's up a little and this is the temporal sulcus what this means is that when the guy pauses behind the bookcase your brain thinks I wonder what's going on behind the bookcase I wonder what it looks like behind there why is he pausing and you send your point of view behind the bookcase to try and figure out what it is that's going on there um this is a projection of your point of view here if you ask people to imagine a tree falling in a forest there's no activation over here but you ask them to imagine just imagine an intentional act like someone coming and sitting in front of you at the theater and you get activation in this posterior Superior temporal Focus because it makes the person wonder why is that person doing that um what does the screen look like from their point of view why do they not realize that my view is now obstructed is it that they can't see that my view is obstructed um so you project your point of view in space and this allows you to understand how other people see the world when other we say other people have a different point of view we often take this to be a metaphor or a figure of speech but within the brain it is a literal truth that we regard other people as existing at other points in space and they literally have different points of view that we have to collect by sending our own point of view out and imagining what the world looks like from that point of view this is somewhat effortful and it's somewhat cognitive but let's see how you guys do here so here's a wall 10t tall three balls AB andc Mr red and Mr Green Mr Green says move the large ball Mr red wants to be helpful which ball does he move how many people vote for ball C how many people vote for ball b how many people votee for ball a the correct answer is B because this is what Mr Green's point of view is from his point of view he can't see that there is a larger ball so if he says move the large ball he can only mean this one Mr Red's point of view he can see all three in order for him to correctly interpret Mr Green's request he has to send his point of view across the room in space and imagine what does it look like to Mr Green in order to make sense of his statement in order to interpret it properly this kind of projection is not automatic actually it's somewhat effortful and if you don't ask people to try hard they often get this wrong this particular question uh the the existence of the fuxa is an instance in social life in which one person fails to send his point of view across the room and imagine what he says imagine how that is going to be perceived by each of the people in the room so I'll show you just a brief fuxa and you can tell that one of the people will say something that had they projected their point of view out in space they would have known that they should not say jinx is strictly a house cat you can't let him outside because he also lacks outdoor survival skills that's just one of those things isn't it sweetheart I don't think gly playing with jinxie too much he hates cats Dam I don't hate cats I don't I don't hate cats I just happen to be more of a dog lover that's all yeah yeah well it's okay if you hate cats Greg no I don't I don't hate cats at all that's okay just be honest about it there's some things I hate I I'm being honest really like what so had his fiance effortfully used her ability to apprehend other people's point of view she would have known that she should not say this um there are people who have great difficulty detecting faux paw and we'll talk about that in just a second um here is another failure uh to model other people's minds here you see Dilbert and the pointy hard boss Dilbert says I didn't think it was possible but for the past month I've done my own job plus teds and done them well I know you're marveling at my accomplishment and you're wondering how you can reward me and the ponyhair boss says maybe I can fire Carl and make this idiot do his job too don't Gilbert is failing to project his point of view in space and to imagine what this situation looks like from the point of view of the boss so the second law of empathy that we might postulate is that empathy proceeds through the imaginative projection of the mind's eye through space time and identity and so what if this doesn't work so well what if people have trouble activating this posterior Superior temporal sulcus and telling point of view from other people we wind up probably in the artistic Spectrum so at its mildest artistic uh mild artistic Spectrum can be a kind of social dyslexia that people are socially clumsy they emit many faux Paws they fail to accurately send their point of view and imagine what other people will think about what they're saying and doing and at the severe end it can be quite serious um the trio of deficits impaired communication impaired reciprocity and restricted interest the this is a functional Imaging study here's our posterior they don't put in here but that's what it is superior temporal sulcus in normal people when you show them a face they immediately light up this area because a normal person thinks oh there's another person I wonder what the world looks like from that point of view and they send their projection uh their mind's eye out in space uh if we look at people in the autistic Spectrum do not do this so there's no activation here in Superior temporal sulkus um now it's it we don't know what the primary def is in the in the autistic Spectrum so I'm not saying this is the primary deficit it is a notable deficit though and um people in the autistic Spectrum have a hard time doing this this is another thing they have a hard time doing these These are normal people listening to the human voice and you see activation here in the temporal lob language centers and maybe it's leaking up in here into the posterior Superior temporal cus telling them of someone speaking that person is another person and has a point of view uh in the AU itic Spectrum we don't see that activation at all and one of the interesting things about people in the autistic spectrum is they do not necessarily understand that spoken speech has a communicative intent um it is not obvious to them that that's the case because if they hear spoken speech there's nothing in their brain that says there's another person speaking with a point of view they may want to communicate with you in fact as Simon Baron Cohen who's one of the leading researchers in this area notes that a number of itic adults have told him that it was surprising to them to learn that when someone looked at them and said their name that meant that they wanted to communicate or wanted to initiate a conversation they did not know that off the bat so what is what causes autism this is actually the leading theory of autism not this I just got this off the web um but the idea behind these two sets of cartoons is fundamentally correct there really is a male brain and and there really is a female brain and the difference between them is perhaps not this but more this say that there's a a male version or model of the brain and there's a female version and the male version is specialized for certain things including being interested in technology machines numbers and systems and that the female brain is specialized for other things being interested in relationships communication uh empathy and perhaps language and the um the mess theory of autism postulates or the autistic spectrum postulates that people in the autistic Spectrum have a hyper male brain they have a a brain that is excellent at things involving numbers um systems machines um but a brain that has a lot of trouble handling things like language sometimes or relationships or empathy so was Einstein in the autistic Spectrum you think no could be Einstein didn't speak until he was four which is a significant language delay his first words were cold soup which is unusual because kids first words are usually mama or dada and he drove everybody crazy when he was a little kid because he repeated back things that people said word for word which is called echolalia that your mother says would you go pick up the newspaper and the kid says would you go pick up the newspaper um this drove people crazy this is sometimes seen in kids in the autistic Spectrum Einstein himself had this observation to make about himself my passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility is oddly always contrasted oddly with my pronounced lack of need for direct contact with other human beings and human communities I'm truly a lone traveler and I have never belonged to my country my home my friends or even my immediate family with my whole heart in the face of all these ties I've never lost a sense of distance and a need for Solitude so you Artis spectrum is not all bad because Einstein did a lot of great stuff um it's just a different way of perceiving the world now let's turn to the last of our three empathic mechanisms adjusting the balance between self and other so if you're in your brain you're going to have your own emotions and your own concerns and then you're also going to be modeling other people's emotions and their concerns then the question arises well how are you going to balance these two things most people balance it this way that their their own self counts for a lot more than the things that they are balancing um some people do it this way that the other counts for way too much so the question arises how are you going to balance self and other um we all understand what the curse of ignorance is say that people who don't know things don't know them but in the area of empathy one of the things that's a surprising Pitfall is the curse of knowledge that in your own mind you know things already maybe a lot of things and it's hard to imagine what it's like not to know those things it's hard to imagine what it's like not to be you because in order to imagine that you would have to supress all the stuff that you know in order to imagine what other people's minds are like you would have to erase your own Blackboard which is hard and timec consuming so in studies for instance if you take hungry people and you offer them food and before you they eat it you say how hungry will you be after you have eaten this they consistently overrate how hungry they will be they say they will be much hungrier than they actually are and the reason is cuz they have trouble imagining their future self their current self is hungry now and that dominates their view of the world um similarly let me try this experiment I'll show you something and the minute that you know what it is say now each one of you individually something will emerge so just as a practice everybody say now now now okay as soon as you know what this is say now ready go all right now we'll run the experiment again but this time imagine that you're someone who has never seen this before and say now when you think that person would know what this is ready go ass soon as that person would know what this is and say now so your first answer had a Peak at 9 seconds your second answer Peak at 6 seconds so it's hard to imagine what it's like not to know this in order to do that you would have to actively suppress your own knowledge which is hard to do um and so here you are now who you are going to be in the future is a different person that is hard to empathize with who you were in the past is a different person that's hard to empathize with um so you can imagine how hard it is to identify or empathize with other people since it's hard even to identify with your future or past self um this is the part of the brain that that carries out this activity of inhibiting your own stuff so that you can model somebody else's stuff this is a neocortical Innovation here we see this is squarely in the neocortex and it's inhibitory in nature so it inhibits what's called sometimes the prepotent self perspective um why don't doctors have any empathy um this points to another reason why empathy needs to be limited is that in this Imaging study people are shown these innocuous pictures of the Q-tip touching the lips hand or foot and these uh images in which a needle is being stuck into the lips hands and foot and if we look at how the average person reacts and in this case doctors who are used to sticking needles into to people what we see here is that the the average people activate the part of their brain that would model pain here's the insula the part of their brain that models bodily Sensations here's that painful area of the anterior singulate cortex again the controll people say that's painful these are the doctors and they have activated their sometimes this is called the anterior paracingulate gyus or part of the medial frontal cortex but this is the inhibitory part of emotion so the doctors have managed to inhibit their own painful modeling of somebody else's pain so much so that they don't really think it's all that painful so that if you ask them well how how is how intense is the pain from sticking a needle into this part of your body the novice says this the expert says this so it's not really painful how unpleasant is it here's the novice here's the expert so when you go to the doctor and they say this won't hurt very much they're they're telling the truth as they know it which is that they have so suppressed their their experience of your pain that it doesn't hurt very much if you've ever been to the orthopedic surgeon as I have for instance and there's all kinds of grizzly things that happen to you and they say oh this will cause a little discomfort this is why they're able to do this so is empathy an unmitigated social good it isn't in the sense that if everybody were very empathic we wouldn't have any orthopedic surgeons because somebody has to be in the room with the person screaming and then say well let me let me move your arm in this horrible way that will make you scream more so there is a useful social position for people who do not have much empathy or they can manage to suppress it and we need those people a lot of people assume naively that empathy is just an unmitigated social good the more of it we have the better off we all are not necessarily true um someone who's your surgeon you probably don't want them fainting at the side of blood or throwing up if you have a needle stuck through your arm so this we might call the Third Law of empathy that empathy finishes with fine-tuning the balance um between self and other which is necessary in order to understand what other people are doing and it's also necessary in a social sense that people can't Simply Be swamped by the empathic stuff that comes from other people so again this part of the brain in the medial prefrontal cortex carries us out well what if this doesn't work so well what if people don't inhibit their own stuff very well uh well there's a word for these people and we call them selfish literally um which is that their self counts too much in their mind because they are selfish um or we call them sometimes we call them narcissistic there are a couple of useful typologies of narcissism that I'll just describe briefly here um you can imagine that one way to have insufficient inhibition of your own self is to have too much self like say you have tremendously strong emotions that are too much for this breaking mechanism to inhibit it's just too much stuff um then you would have a a hot narcissism so people like this tend to be say characterologically artistic people often have a hot narcissism they are so emotional that they can't re it in um people who are experiencing intense emotion of any sort tend to be not very empathic um partly because of this mechanism so someone having a panic attack or someone having a terrible depression the people are usually not very empathic because their emotions have run away with them there are people whose emotions run away with them all the time say in a narcissism sense and um we might call that a hot narcissism typology there's also you can imagine another scenario in which your emotions aren't that strong but your inhibitory control mechanism is weak and so it's just not up to the task of inhibiting your own stuff and we might call this a cold kind of narcissism in adults when adults have insufficient inhibitory mechanisms the things they tend to seek out are money drugs power and sex so that these people not inspired but they are motivated um by these other things that they want to acquire children are in this category because their inhibitory mechanisms are often not very good so if you've ever tried to play a board game with a child say the kid keeps insisting that it's his turn every time um because it's hard to inhibit long enough to let somebody else take their turn um there are also I think this is not well known enough so I'll just include this everybody knows mostly that when someone says unabashedly well it's all about me and they act selfishly that they they may have some narcissistic traits um what is less familiar to to people is that there's also a person who says it's all about you I'm really doing this for other people but they still act selfishly um this also is a a kind of narcissism that is probably more Insidious and difficult for people to recognize nevertheless it is uh in the world all over so when somebody says I'm just doing this for you or it's all about other people or really I'm just helping other people then you have to look at what it is they're actually doing whether benefits the other people or whether it seems to benefit themselves more so this is where we've been talking about empathy which arose as a Maman Innovation as part of the survival imperative of mammals that they must know what is going on inside other mammals if uh if they're to become successful Mamon parents or the young are going to survive into the Next Generation and partly because of that we have this modeling mechanism which enables us to feel into other people we can internally understand or feel what is their sensation what is their emotion what does their action feel like to them and then we have a couple of later more cognitive more more thinky kind of uh uh empathic mechanisms one the effortful cognitive projection of the self- perspective in space and then the ability to adjust the balance between self and other so that a person can inhibit their own prepotent self- perspective the um I'll leave you with one final thought and then we'll go to questions in terms of this modeling thing when people for instance move rhythmically to music say when they tap their foot to a musical beat they are exhibiting the modeling function of empathy that when you hear a regular sound like this your brain interprets it in terms of the motor action it would take to produce that sound and that is why you see the behavior leaking out into people's actual motor movements that they're modeling well what if my foot was hitting the ground at this Tempo that would make this sound and that model uh leaks out into their actual Behavior so that when you notice yourself tapping or snapping your fingers or clapping to the beat this is what it's from it's from this ancient modeling empathy mechanism that allows you to model and feel into communicative signals coming from other people um there's that all right so let's stop now and then uh and do some questions question there uh in the mail model and female model brains how does that play out for homosexuals like does is that in the brain at all or it is in the brain yeah everybody hear that question um how does maleness and F femaleness play out in the brains of say male homosexual men um with without getting into uh too much technical detail it's fairly clear now that most gay men have a partially feminized male brain um in a different part of the brain than we were looking at but that is why for instance gay men often have female identified interests like uh relationships or empathy or communication or language that gay men are much more interested in those things than the average straight man is it's also it's true of functions that have nothing to do with empathy for instance men throw objects more accurately than women they hit the target more accurately gay men throw with an accuracy that is intermediate between men and women so it's it's uh relatively clear that gay men have a partially feminized male brain and they do tend to be more empathic than the average man in general women are more empathically skilled than men that's not true of every man and every woman you can find men who are very empathic you can find women who aren't um but as a group women are more empathically skilled question can we say that the depictions of pain and destruction and disasters in literature and art are designed to blunt our sense of empathy our depictions of uh destruction and pain and art designed to blunt our sense of empathy I would guess they're designed to heighten it or evoke our sense of empathy that say if art works it makes you feel something um and often say in a in a novel in which you identify with the characters if something bad happens to them it's somewhat painful for you so I think good art um evokes that I think entertainment blunts it so say if you see a mass Market entertainment film in which uh I just saw the Bruce Willis film not to say it's bad which it's not but Bruce Willis has tossed about like a rag doll throughout the course of the film nothing bad happens to him he doesn't break any bones he doesn't suffer visibly at any point that I think does blunt our empathy entertainment but art shouldn't do that and and actually that's one of the fundamental distinctions between art and entertainment um that's worth worth describing I have a two-part question about the male female Brighton theory of autism the first is that it's my understanding that women report feeling more empathy and they recall feeling more empathy but if you test them online as a bit an event is happening they actually report the same amount of empathy empathy as men so I'm curious how strong is the neuroscientific evidence for showing that women experience more empathy and more relational concerns than men on on average because of course this is these are overlapping distributions and then the second question is what does it actually mean for autism to be an extreme form of the male brain does that mean something Beyond just an analogy to a cultural stereotype or is that actually tell us something about the causal roots of autism and is there any evidence for that sure the the in terms of the first question there's quite a bit of evidence actually um and the best evidence comes from studies in which say uh people witness an event say they watch a film and someone stops them at periodic times and ask them what is that person feeling um that it's clear that men are less empathically accurate than women as a group not but as a group they are less empathically accurate the um one of the things that we know for instance from Primate Research getting to your second part of the question is that you might think well um boy babies play with balls and trucks because we tell them to and girl babies play with dolls because we tell them to but actually primate recus monkeys the male infants Bale reesus monkeys prefer to play with balls and trucks spontaneously and the female infants prefer to play with dolls spontaneously and no one has told them or modeled the behavior so it's clear that there is a spontaneous Affinity in maess for machines and technology and um artificial gadgets for lack of a better word um and that there's a spontaneous preference in women for relationship empathy and that probably includes language because of course one of the ways in which men male and female school children differ is that female school children are a little better at language activities the male school children um in the autistic Spectrum the hyper male brain we see the Frank language impairment a fair amount of the time um which may represent say the the extreme end of that maless so it's likely that it's more than a metaphor for that it's a fundamental biological distinction that has utility in evolution say um the fact that women have an interest in empathy is not an accident it's a it's a a biological necessity in an evolutionary sense if they are to rear and protect and nurture children or offspring um U the so men and women are bred by Evolution for different tasks um men are bred for combat and hunting and fighting and it appears is in some sense that men are bred for making gadgets um one of the ways we can tell that men are bred for combat is that men are larger and more muscular than women not every man is not larger than every woman but as as a group men are larger and more muscular um they are bred for uh physical combat in some sense so it probably is more than just a metaphor thank you sure I guess to stay with this theme and this is probably the popular topic um EXC me for my voice it just lasted yesterday but um just going back to this issue of male female brain sort of the major lesson from the emerging literature on developmental Neuroscience is that the brain is incredibly plastic you could have lesions to the hippocampus and still children will recover Language by the time they get to fourth or fifth grade it's so we see this amazing plasticity and also sort of the sex differences we classically see sort of David bus's work across cultures where he shows you know women really focus on status men really focus on parents all of that is sort of really tempered when Alice eagle and Wendy would look at and they say look it's a social effect if you look at really egalitarian societies all these effects go away so oh you just lost your light but um ultimately my question becomes well even if we see these uh differences in adults how much can we really say that it's really biological versus just socialization because it seems really hard to divorce those two patterns especially in a in societies where men and women are really very differently socialized from a very early age what one of the data sets once you see that is in the primates say who are not socialized in any particular way um the you know what's a great book on the subject is the essential Difference by Simon Baron con which is a terrific book the um I think it's likelier actually that the evidence falls on the side of um the the neural hard wirring than it does on the side of socialization I think that's likely um that's that's my reading of the evidence I'm sure people could have a interesting debate or um argue those points um the the brain has plasticity but not infinite plasticity particularly around things that are fundamental to it so as you might know um say in the 60s and 70s um when kids say had inadvertent genitalia destruction at Birth which happen sometimes during circumcision cuz they use an electrical Coty iron and every so often the there's a short out and there you go um the the prevailing theory was well we can raise these kids as girls we can it happens you know within a few weeks of birth we can socialize them as girls and they won't know the difference um and that was tried in it was a disastrous failure actually that those kids grown to adulthood despite the fact that they've been socialized as girls felt like guys um so I don't think the brain is not infinitely plastic it's it has limitations particularly among its more fundamental units and gender and sex are profoundly fundamental because they have a huge impact on reproductive Fitness yeah and so among the parts of the brain that it's hard to Tinker with and get away with those are those are some of those parts so I'm less friendly to the socialization hypothesis although I know some people are yeah just uh one interesting piece of research to follow up that uh they did some really amazing work recently at MIT where I I believe they took rats and they disconnected the uh orbital loes the from from the eyes the pathway to the orbital loes and connected it to sort of the temporal loes the pa the parts that really sort of monitor auditory uh impulses and Al they looked at them later on in life and the temporal loes morphed to mirror sort of the acial loes and they started to take on the function of site and like like that was sort of an amazing work to me to illustrate sort of plasticity on you know vision and hearing you would think very defined regions very defined systems and here we see plasticity even at that level so so that's where yeah that I think is much less surprising innately than say a a gender based plasticity I think um just that someone who works in the field it it it's interesting and it's not devoid of interest but it doesn't strike me as so surprising I my seat okay thank you very much sure thank you that's all the time we have for questions right now thanks very much

Channel: Talks at Google

Views: 50,304

Keywords: talks at google, ted talks, inspirational talks, educational talks, The Neuroscience of Empathy, Thomas Lewis, neuroscience, neuroscience lecture, empathy, science of the brain

Id: 1-T2GsG0l1E

Length: 57min 34sec (3454 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 18 2007