The Neuroscience of Compassion | Tania Singer

The concept of plasticity. So it's really the concept of trainability and changeability, not only of our brain, but also our immune system, stress system behavior. So I'm not just talking about brain, but the whole body. What I'm doing is to present you very fresh data. So it's actually, you know, like, because we can't put them on the web yet, they are so fresh. About a resource project, a one-year longitudinal study where we train the mental capacities of human beings. So we do mental training, secular mental training, which is based a little bit on meditation from the East contemplative tradition, a little bit from Western tradition and secularized so that it can be amenable to science and to people from all religion or also artistic people. I think you know the concept of mindfulness. You probably have heard about that, about training attention of your mind, stabilizing your mind, becoming present in the moment. This is what we train three months at the beginning in the module we call presence. So it's really getting your mind just stable and getting interceptive body awareness, because very often we are kind of thinking here and we don't know what's happening below, but we have a body which is telling us a lot of very important things. Then there is a module which is called affect and it will always be wet now, because this is about emotions. This is about training compassion, benevolence, loving kindness, empathy and how to regulate emotion in the context of anger, stress. And then this is juxtaposed and I will tell you why we have actually these two modules. It's based on science and what we know in science. It's called perspective and this is a more cognitive module which allows you to get a perspective on yourself, on your mind and on others. And I will talk about theory of mind or the ability to take perspective of others, which is a very crucial ability to understand each other, especially when someone is from another culture or different or have different beliefs. People have to every day, 30 minutes or 20 minutes, do these kind of core exercises, only two exercises in each module. We give them cell phone. I will show you how that works. And you are accompanied in your everyday life like toothbrushing, but you have to do mental exercise. And we have, you know, like classical exercises alone. You just close your eyes and you exercise your mind alone. Or we have dyadic exercise, where you actually have a partner and you have to call up the partner. This is how a retreat looks like when 100 people who participated in this one year long study are actually sitting and training with the teachers. At the beginning of each module of three months, people, I mean, they don't look like that. This was just for the picture. They have their normal clothes. They are normal people like we only. And they just sit and exercise and get, you know, taught into these exercises. So this is when they are on holiday, they send us these pictures and they have these cell phones. And on the cell phones, you have the, you know, like the mental practices, depending on the module you are in, you can listen to them. And we know exactly, you know, we are spying on our participants day and night. We know exactly, you know, how long did people practice, what did they practice, how did they feel before, after, how did they sleep and so on. But it also allows you to integrate it in your everyday life. You have to do 20 to 30 minutes a day. And this is how a dyad looks like. You can do it in your workplace. It's 10 minutes, but it's not a chitchat, but it's kind like of a mental, very concentrated exercise together. This allows you, the listener trains empathic listener, whereas the person who speaks trains to become mindful of what is going on in the body. And we have other diets where we train perspective taking. So you have to detach from your own perspective and creep into the mind of the other. It's like mind reading exercise. What we had is almost 300 participants in this study. Everything you will see in blue is what we call retest control group. These are people who one year are tested like crazy with 90 measures, but they don't get any intervention. They are the real altruists because they basically do all this testing without benefiting. We need them because we have to know what's happening when you just test people hundreds of times. And then there are these two cohorts, which like you see, start with this mindfulness module three months. And then what is important, you see the cohorts do the sequence differently. The one cohort goes in the compassion module first, the other goes in the perspective, cognitive module first. So this allows you at T2, you see the second measurement point, to compare what the specific exercise is doing with your brain, body, and heart, and compare different types of exercises as an effect. So it's a very conservative design, you could say. So you have to remember always these colors, because the color is now coding the results. Yellow is always the classic mindfulness training. Red is always compassion, heart training. Green is always the more cognitive perspective taking. When you ask, do the people do it? We had a dropout rate. Dropout means how many participants really did it a year. And usually these kind of scientific studies, you have dropout rates of 40% to 60%. We had less than 7%. So this is Guinness Book of Records. Every day they do their exercises. Some do it even twice. So it's a very, very high level of exercising. And these people are people like you and me, average 43, up to 55, then we cut. We measured them extensively. As I said, we measured the genes, we measured their brain, we measured they got cell phones. We asked, what are you doing now? What are you thinking now? We measured economic gains, and I will show you that, because that's relevant to this forum. So we measured the typical kind of battery, which empirical behavioral economists would use, trust gain, and so on. We used the cortisol, stress level, immune system, medical measure. Now, the result. Why did we separate this red one and the perspective? There are two pathways in our brain which allow us to understand other people's mind and what they're feeling and thinking. The red one, which is associated to a phenomenon like empathy, like empathic emotional resonance with the other. You have pain, I feel the pain directly. You are stressed, I'm stressed directly. Compassion is a real concern for you. It's very different from empathy, and Mathieu can tell you perhaps a bit more about this very crucial difference between empathy and compassion. But what is important, it's a motivational emotional state. You feel for someone, you feel with someone. This one is what psychopaths have. This is, you understand the mind of the other, you understand the intentions, the beliefs of the people. You can see, usually these two roots work together in a healthy person. But for example, in psychopathy, they are very good in manipulating people because they know exactly what the other person needs, thinks, believes, but they have no compassion and empathy. They don't care. So this is when it dissociates. And this is how we measure, actually, the changes in brain and behaviour. Participants go into the scanner five times within this one year and they see screens. One task, for example, shows on one hand videos of people explaining very emotional stories, suffering stories of their lives, real stories. And you measure the brain, the empathic emotional response to these stories, and also what they say they feel, how much compassion and empathy. On the other hand, the stories are conducted in that some stories need a lot of cognitive perspective taking. They need a lot of this false belief understanding. So you can compute like a social intelligence score, how good is someone in doing this cognitive perspective taking. So I will show you data which show whether we can actually, through training, increase this ability and this ability. So this is when we scan the brain while you empathise with suffering of the other. You have this whole empathy for pain network lighting up. What is important for you, you don't have to know all the regions and what it means, is the network, which is very different from the network engaged in cognitive perspective taking. So theory of mind mentalising is all the same word. You see, they are very different networks. And because they are so different, we can also train them differentially. In the fitness club, you know, you can train with different techniques, your arms, your back, and your feet differently. And this is what we do with the mind. The mind is also very complex, and you can, through different mental practices, cultivate different aspects. What we now show is that what happened in our study with this compassion on one hand, and theory of mind ability, this perspective-taking ability on the other. So the blue one is always the people who just got tested all the time, but didn't do anything. So basically, just being tested again and again in these exercises, don't do anything. Just living your life a year long will not improve your theory of mind. Now doing three months of mindfulness training, you know, attention and breathing, does nice other things, but doesn't do anything with theory of mind. You don't get better because you breathe. Compassion doesn't do a lot. It's really the perspective-taking module with these exercises which brings a huge increase in theory of mind acuity. The second cohort, you remember, had also first mindfulness, nothing. Again, we replicated another cohort. Now they do perspective first, and you see this huge increase. And then they do compassion, nothing really happens anymore. So it's a very specific effect of a certain exercise they do every day on an ability which is hugely important, for example, for global compassion to emerge, for in-group, out-group distinction, for, you know, starting to understand other cultures, other religion, the behavior of people which are not like you. So for conflict resolution, this is the ability you want to train. Just repeating and living your life doesn't make you much more compassionate. Breathing, not really. But compassion training makes you very much compassionate. A good sign for us, because we designed it for increasing compassion. And then the perspective training, a little bit, but not more. So second cohort, mindfulness training, three months, nothing really for compassion. It does other things, but not compassion. Perspective-taking is kind of, you know, it's also a social cognitive skill. You train a little bit high, but now really when they train the compassion block, they have this boost in compassion and empathy. So you see, you can, now the question, this was behavior, now we are a brain scientist too. So we wanted to know, can you change the hardware of your brain? We always thought that we can't change anymore, that our brains are just declining and getting worse after age 25. So this is really showing whether you can increase in cortical thickness, this means in gray matter volume of your brain through training. And what I show you again is after six months of affect in one group or perspective in the other group. And you see, this is real cortical thickness. So this is increase in your hardware of your brain after training, which happens in the network I showed you before, which is the emotional empathy compassion network after compassion training, and happens in the fear of mind network after fear of mind training. So you see again that the training increases cortical thickness in networks which are processing the specific mental content you are training. After compassion training, you get better in limbic networks, you get bigger limbic networks. After fear of mind training, you improve the networks necessary to make this shift into the minds of others. Why are we so interested in all this? It's because we want to actually improve global cooperation. We want to see how can we become global citizens. We measured more than 17 different measures, and some of them were taken from behavioral microeconomics. And some are just questionnaire what people think they are. Some are like more psychological implicit tasks, and also donation. People could give money to donations, just to charities. Now I just show you a composite of everything, you know, like it's basically a big hyper factor of post-social cooperation. Just living your life doesn't make you more post-social on average. Having mindfulness training three months, not really, but now compassion boosts altruistic motivation to a huge extent. And perspective training is not so strong. Now you see in the second cohort, mindfulness could do a little bit, but it's really compassion who brings it up after nine months. So this shows that actually this mental training can change what economists would say is stable preferences. Economists would say you are egoistic or you are altruistic, you don't change, there's nothing to do. This means you can change preferences with 30-minute training in an adult human being. Does time of practice matter? There is this boom of mindfulness in America right now, also a bit in New York. And there are a lot of two-day courses in, you know, transformative mindfulness. And then you think you will have no stress anymore, you will be a better person. So I will show you data on stress to answer in a scientific way that two is two days enough. So what we do is actually what I have to do now, but imagine I would be sitting in front of an audience with all white coats and you would all be like, you know, you wouldn't give me any social cues which would allow me to say, okay you are still with me. And this really stresses everyone. When you do that you get a huge cortisol response. So the cortisol is the hormone which is the end product of your HPH stress axis. And this stress response is a real biological social stress response. What we find is that the control group has a stress response. Now three months of mindfulness training, it reduces subjective stress a lot. We can see people's report, they feel much better. But it has not arrived down onto the HPH cortisol axis in the biology of the body. It's really the compassion training after six months and the other social cognition training, the perspective training which brings social stress down. We really have amazing evidence for plasticity on all levels. An adult human being and even on the level of cortical thickness, so like the hardware of your brain, you can actually increase your social intelligence, your happiness. But some changes when it wants to drop down into health and biology needs time and regular practice. It really matters which mental training technique you engage in. Depending on which, you know, meditation you do, you will cultivate different networks and, you know, some are more efficient for one thing than the others. So this is just like, you know, what I presented to some economy colleagues some years ago. You know, I said compassion training can increase positive affect, change the brain, reduce stress, increase cooperation. Economists came to me and said, this is incredible. This is, if that is true, we need to rethink economic models. We need to rethink the backbone and the human nature picture we have when we think about neoclassicistic models of homeo-economic growth. Because, and you know, Dennis Knorr is working with me on caring economics now, is basically using this insight from psychology and neuroscience to inform new models of economic decision making. And you could say this is the old neoclassistic picture of economy. This is really the backbone of most utility function we can find nowadays. Some have fairness preferences and stuff like that. The psychological view would be much more, we have different motivational system. You know, the increase in the brain network I showed you is actually a system associated to care, positive affect and affiliation. When you activate or cultivate that, it will basically influence your decision in more prosocial. And so we have to think about, we have different motivational system which need all to be balanced. And they will, the system which be most activated will determine the behavior you will show. This is seven system we started differentiating based on psychological and biological knowledge. So we can be motivated by achievement, by power, consumption, affiliation, care and threat. Consumption, that's the typical utility function in economic theory. Consumption leads to selfish behavior. But care leads to prosocial behavior. Affiliation is actually not care. Affiliation is you want to belong to an in-group, you want to belong to a group and you are panicked that you could be excluded of a group. Power always leads to competitive behavior. Achievement is excelling, you want to be best, you want to optimize your performance. In sports this is very important. Anger of course to aggressive behavior. Fear and threat system is defense behavior and getting through. So now you can basically formulate, and we did that, different utility function for each of the motivation behavior relationships. With this model you don't have just one utility function. You have, depending on the context, you will have a motivation system which will be most activated and this will determine with a certain probability the behavior, the choices you do. So what is important for policy making is now to know how should the context be to activate these different systems. And so obviously I'm interested how can we activate care and affiliation because this, you know, leads to not so much in-group, out-group distinction. It leads to social behavior, to global cooperation and so on. And so we identified, you know, this is I think the speciality of economics. Institutional design, this is politics, it's changing laws. Nudging, we have like one nudging unit. In Germany we have one, in America, in UK. So this is very much coming up. How can you change the context so that it kind of primes a certain behavior which is beneficial for a state or something. The psychologists that I just showed you have identified other ways to change your preferences by internal mental training or education. You can just by 30 minutes or, you know, like basically changing your mental attitude when you wake up in the morning, sometimes even one minute, you can actually change your motivation system internally and then your decision will be different. Which motivation system is now driving my behavior? What is really driving me now? Oh, this is stress, this is threat, this will not be a good decision. So we think we should do some exercise, the decision will look different. We want to now basically bring the science-based program into society, into schools and education because the brain of these kids is so plastic. You don't need to have 30 minutes, you know. It's like so that's what we, you know, try to do that they kind of kids learn again to become, you know, like interdependent beings with some kind of secular ethics and compassionate motivation and the ability to regulate their emotions and stress. So that was what I wanted to share with you and I'm looking forward to the discussion.