Compassion Rooted in Brain & Biology
By: Vinod Bhardwaj
Tags: Mirror Neurons, Brain, Covid Help, Compassionate Leadership, Biology

This coronavirus has challenged all of us. It has taught us that life can change in ways we aren’t prepared for. It has taught us that we are all connected. And it has led us to have more compassion. We’ve always had compassion — look at how we respond to natural disasters by raising money and sending food and supplies. But this time is different. This time, we face the same threat, even if some are more at risk than others. We know these are challenging times, and we want to help each other through them. I decided to read more about the new University of Virginia study, which suggests that we are hardwired to empathize because we closely associate people close to us — friends, spouses, lovers — with our very selves. I am sharing my thoughts on compassion.

Humans are selfish. It’s so easy to say. The same goes for so many assertions that follow. Greed is good. Altruism is an illusion. Cooperation is for suckers. Competition is natural, war inevitable. The bad in human nature is stronger than the good. These kinds of claims reflect age-old assumptions about emotion. For millennia, we have regarded emotions as the fount of irrationality, baseness, and sin. The idea of the seven deadly sins takes our destructive passions for granted. Plato compared the human soul to a chariot: the intellect is the driver, and the emotions are the horses. Life is a continual struggle to keep the emotions under control.

Even compassion, the concern we feel for another being’s welfare, has been treated with downright disdain. Kant saw it as a weak and misguided sentiment: “Such benevolence is called soft-heartedness and should not occur at all among human beings,” he said of compassion. Many questions, whether genuine compassion exists at all — or whether it is inherently motivated by self-interest. Recent studies of compassion argue persuasively for a different take on human nature, one that rejects the preeminence of self-interest. These studies support a view of the emotions as rational, functional, and adaptive — an idea that has its origins in Darwin’s Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals. This research suggests that compassion and benevolence are an evolved part of human nature, rooted in our brain and biology, and ready to be cultivated for the greater good.

Helping others triggered activity in the caudate nucleus and anterior cingulate, portions of the brain that turn on when people receive rewards or experience pleasure. This is a rather remarkable finding: helping others brings the same happiness we get from the gratification of personal desire. The brain, then, seems wired up to respond to others’ suffering — indeed, it makes us feel good when we can alleviate that suffering. But do other parts of the body also suggest a biological basis for compassion?

It seems so. Take the loose association of glands, organs, and cardiovascular and respiratory systems known as the autonomic nervous system (ANS). The ANS plays a primary role in regulating our blood flow and breathing patterns for different actions. For example, when we feel threatened, our heart and breathing rates usually increase, preparing us either to confront or flee from the threat — the so-called “fight or flight” response. What is the ANS profile of compassion? As it turns out, when young children and adults feel empathy for others, this emotion is reflected in genuine physiological changes: Their heart rate goes down from baseline levels, which prepares them not to fight or flee but to approach and soothe.

Then there’s oxytocin, a hormone that floats through the bloodstream. Research performed on the small, stocky rodents known as prairie voles indicates that oxytocin promotes long-term bonds and commitments and the nurturing behavior — like care for offspring — that lies at the heart of compassion. It may account for that overwhelming feeling of warmth and connection we feel toward our offspring or loved ones. Indeed, breastfeeding and massages elevate oxytocin levels in the blood (as does eating chocolate). In some recent studies, researchers have found that when people perform behaviors associated with compassionate love — warm smiles, friendly hand gestures, affirmative forward leans — their bodies produce more oxytocin. This suggests compassion may be self-perpetuating: Being benevolent causes a chemical reaction in the body that motivates us to be even more compassionate.

World vide researchers strands of evidence suggest: Compassion is deeply rooted in human nature; it has a biological basis in the brain and body. Humans can communicate compassion through facial gestures and touch, and these displays of compassion can serve vital social functions, strongly suggesting an evolutionary basis of compassion. And when experienced, kindness overwhelms selfish concerns and motivates altruistic behavior. Parents can also teach compassion by example. A landmark study of altruism by Pearl and Samuel Oliner found that children who have compassionate parents tend to be more altruistic. In Oliners’ survey of Germans who helped rescue Jews during the Nazi Holocaust, one of the strongest predictors of this inspiring behavior was the individual’s memory of growing up in a family that prioritized compassion and altruism. In a series of four studies, researchers invited college students to come into the lab, outfitted them with electrocardiogram sensors, and then had them watch a video of a peer describing her feelings about a death in the family, a sequence of photographs of suffering people (such as starving children), or videos of children being treated for cancer at St. Jude’s hospital. Another control group of students watched an uninteresting video (of a guy building a fence), slides evocative of pride, or an inspiring video. After the videos, the students picked a single number on a scale to indicate the level of compassion they felt.

In comparing these different groups, researchers found that eliciting feelings of compassion always increased Vagal tone. But the Berkeley team made one disconcerting observation from their first three studies — the magnitude of self-reported feelings of heart did not correlate with more significant Vagal tone. So does Vagal’s style correspond to levels of felt compassion? To answer this, they tried a more nuanced experiment where students indicated their levels of felt compassion in real-time using a continuous dial (rather than filling out a scale after the fact, as in the first three experiments). This more visceral method showed that, indeed, feelings of compassion were associated with increased Vagal tone. In sum, the Vagus nerve appears to be intimately tied to experiencing compassion towards other people’s suffering, providing more evidence for Porges’s PolyVagal theory. More specifically, these studies show that what happens in your Vagus affects whether or not you can handle the feelings provoked by another person’s suffering — and whether or not you’ll feel concerned and motivated to help.

Human communities are only as healthy as our conceptions of human nature. It has long been assumed that selfishness, greed, and competitiveness lie at the core of human behavior, the products of our evolution. It takes little imagination to see how these assumptions have guided most realms of human affairs, from policymaking to media portrayals of social life. But clearly, recent scientific findings forcefully challenge this view of human nature. We see that compassion is deeply rooted in our brains, bodies, and the most basic ways we communicate. What’s more, a sense of compassion fosters human behavior and helps shape the lessons we teach our children.

This moment calls for careful reflection and reinvestment in compassion as a foundational approach to health. Calling attention to compassion in this way is not sentimental. It is pointing out a tangible good, without which health for all is impossible. In a sense, COVID-19 has shown us that a healthy person and a healthy world are the same. And healthy people and a healthy world are both strengthened immeasurably by having compassion at the heart of health.