Just a brief note before we get started — one of the beauties of being a mechanical engineering professor writing about empathy is that I don’t have to hold to any particular conventions.  I can slice and dice behavior as I see fit, and can pay as much tribute to the psychological literature as I like.

This is kind of the way I feel about what I call emotional empathy.  Emotional empathy, as I define it, is the next level up in emergent brain function that comes from connecting with another sentient agent at the limbic system level.  The limbic system is the next hunk of gray matter we evolved on top of our autonomic nervous system and cerebellum.  In the Triune theory of the brain (which we will discuss later) this is the poorly named neomammalian cortex — responsible for our emotions and basic attachment behavior.  Emotional empathy also typically works on short time and spatial scales — you see someone crying, you feel bad, and you attempt to comfort them.  You hear a baby hollering, you pick it up, soothe it, and then after some modestly predictable time, the baby is happy and you put it back in its crib.  Or something — depends on what that baby wants.

Emotional empathy has a lot in common with what the psychological literature calls affective empathy, which is the usual separation of types of empathy that that particular set of researchers makes.  The main point of difference is that emotional empathy is scaffolded on top of mirroring behavior in my way of thinking.  What this means is the emotional empathy includes not just the effects of the limbic system (you feel happy when someone is happy, sad when someone is sad,) but is also triggered by those deeper reactions to facial gestures and body motions that characterize mirroring behavior.  This is yet another byproduct of emergent differentiation that was introduced previously.  In short, emotional empathy involves coupling between the limbic and lower brain systems.

Emotional empathy is also likely a meta-linear phenomenon.  What that means is that it also displays behavior that we associate with linear systems — namely exponential roll-off, some type of amplification (or attenuation) and delay in response.  You can obviously have emotional empathy triggered by a phone call, or contact.  But it’s also much more likely to work in person.  And the coherence that empathy generates is also much more likely to be predictable in time scale among large groups of people.  You know how long it’s likely you’re going to have to help out your friend through empathizing.  Emotional empathy, while involving two parties, is also primarily simplex in nature — the communication is going one way while it’s happening, and that has implications on social structure, which we’ll get back to.

Emotional empathy and mirroring behavior from my observations comprise the majority of empathetic responses that most people feel.  And I’d like to talk some more, but I have to pat my dog.  This should only take a few minutes!

Takeaways:  Emotional empathy has a lot in common with affective empathy — the sharing of emotions between people.  It helps to be in the same room, though.

Further reading: This is one way of unpacking some ideas I’ll present later.  We’ll come back to this for a more systemic explanation.

One of the things that has been going along gangbusters as of late are advances in neuroscience.  I think that’s great — getting at the core functioning of the brain is likely to get at a core understanding of ourselves.

One of the key tools in developing that understanding is the use of fMRI imaging.  The short version of how fMRI works is that it looks at the blood flow in the brain, and shows what parts of the brain are more active than other parts under different stressors or conditions.  That’s cool.

But there are inherent problems with all of this kind of knowing, in that in ways that will be discussed later, it a.) is a very reductionist view of a very holistic organ, and b.) feeds into our worst habits of fragmentation of understanding.  This kind of analysis is very popular with scientists because it also allows scientists to stake out their own ‘turf’ in the brain where they’re the expert (see this earlier blog post) and as such, really takes a whack at researchers attempting to understand the whole brain as a synergistic organ.  It’s a whole lot easier to generate data showing that certain types of stimuli and situations cause certain parts of the brain to get (essentially) hot.  Through repeated measurements, you can gain high reliability that your experiments are repeatable.  That’s not such a bad thing, all in all.

But where one gets in trouble is with expanding what one might call validity of a given theory.  Just because you can repeat an experiment over and over again doesn’t mean that the result tells you a greater, more valid truth.

Here’s the one thing you almost never see in the neuroscience literature — the brain is an evolutionary, emergent organism.  We (as a species) didn’t wake up one day with a cerebellum.  We (as a species) didn’t just wake up one day with a limbic system.  They evolved to demands in our environment, and our need as a species for survival.  Gaining that big cerebrum was likely a process of accretion — natural selection favored larger and larger brains, that were more well-connected.

What that means is that we can’t just decide to leave those evolved connections behind.  With the beginning of empathy, mirroring behavior, those automatic parts of the brain became increasing wired to the other parts of the brain as we continued our ascent as a species of larger and larger sentience.  As such, mirroring behavior itself, because it is such a successful mode of transferring information between sentient agents (other folks!) also likely utilized more and more of the brain as we evolved.

That’s why the phrase ‘Be the Change you want to see’ is such a powerful slogan.  Because no matter how complex the behavior, we all know that mirroring behavior, expressed as modeling that change, is one of the best ways to reach others.  Because that modeling goes back to the very roots of empathetic connection that define us as a sentient species.

Takeaways: The brain is fundamentally an emergent, evolutionary organ.  It’s all connected together.  And when a scientist stands up and declaring a particular theory they’ve developed is a.) correct, and b.) based on fragmentation, take it with a grain of salt.  Because just because we don’t understand, it doesn’t mean we’re not connected.

Further reading: (this will set you up for future posts — The Triune Brain)

Mirroring behavior is the bottom of my empathy pyramid, and where we all likely got our connections started, over 450 million years ago.  One can argue about the beginning of coordinated behavior, but it likely appeared in the late Cambrian or Ordovician Periods, with fish finding protection in their own species by keying off specific motions of other fish  — schooling for protection.   I’m personally betting on the vertebrates, with their enclosed nervous system, as the originator of our own empathy gateway.

We practice basic mirroring behavior all the time.  I yawn, you yawn.  But because the brain is an emergent, evolutionary organ, the roots of mirroring behavior have spread their neural pathways throughout the whole brain.  I call this phenomenon emergent differentiation, in that this successful behavior, as we evolved, daisy-chained in higher and higher levels of functionality.

Anyone who’s ever taken a karate class has experienced this.  You watch your sensei, you follow his or her motions.  You repeat.  It seems easy, until the sensei leaves the room.  Then, all of the sudden, it’s not so easy.  As an engineering student, I can remember watching the professor solve a thermodynamics problem.  I was sure I knew how to do it, until I got home and had to complete the problem set.  Then what I believed I had learned, I obviously hadn’t.

Understanding mirroring behavior is key in also understanding the integral/external connection of self-creation.  Mirroring behavior, at the bottom, is “we do what we see.”  Higher forms of empathy are needed in order to get to the point of  “we do what we ought/think/believe” without the example in front of us.

Mirroring behavior is at the core of our developmental selves as well.  Most of us have played peek-a-boo with a baby.  The TV series, the Teletubbies, was in large part constructed on the mirroring developmental stage.  Dipsy or Po would do something (like hide their face, which could be mimicked by a child) and then develop consequentiality by repeating the same action again.  The infant, able to mimic and repeat, would develop the beginning of a sense of time.

Mirroring can be trans-species.  In The Age of Empathy, de Waal documents simple mirroring between human researchers and rhesus monkeys.  He opens his mouth, the baby monkey opens its mouth.  Obviously, the more intelligent the species, the larger the possibilities are expanded.  Monkey see, monkey do.

In mathematical terms, which will become more important in this blog, mirroring behavior is what I call the simplest of a meta-linear behavior.  For those familiar with systems theory, a linear system is one where given an input (like pushing on a swing) we can expect to see an output (the swing responds by, well, swinging back and forth) that matches the input, except in amplitude (our push is small, but the swing motion is large) and delay, or phase lag (it takes a second for the swing to respond.)  As the simplest kind of meta-linear behavior, I yawn, and a second later, you yawn.  Your yawning is dependent on my yawning — you wouldn’t be yawning if you hadn’t seen me do it — and is a couple of seconds delayed.

What’s the purpose in that understanding?  Mirroring behavior does deliver the coherence that empathy promises.  But it is on short time scales (you have to be watching) and without much magnification (you’re not going to invent a new way of yawning.)  And once you get done yawning, that’s the end of that!

Takeaways:  Mirroring is the root of our coordinated behavior.  Originating in the basal ganglia, it has spread throughout the brain.  It is one of the first components of empathy that we see in small children.

Further Reading:  This is an interesting quick piece expanding on some of the themes above:  

Empathy Pyramid English For those unfamiliar with the academic life, allow me to give you the gift of a secret.  We get famous by being different.  And by being first.  It’s one of the things that generates the academic mind — you are rewarded with reputation for EXCLUSIVITY of knowledge.  But you’re employed by an institution who wants you to teach others.  So think about that — could you have a more conflicted set of social incentives?  The more people that learn from you, the less exclusive your knowledge is.  And the more your reputation declines.  There’s some critical point where all this results in a body of followers, and you become famous.  But that’s not true for most of us.

Because of this phenomena (and others that I’ll discuss in future posts) academics are always generating new theories.  Some new theories are derivative — or really, refinements of old theories. Occasionally someone will publish a new theory on something.  This is as true for work in empathy research as any.

But for lots of reasons (which have to do with social organization) there’s little incentive for people to look around a given field and find a way to connect the dots, or assemble the pieces into a larger, aggregate theory.  First off, it’s hard to prove rigorously that the assembled pieces actually fit together.  Second — there’s no glory for the assembler.  All you’ve done is borrow others’ works.  No bump in reputation for you. Like the blind men and the elephant, you get your academic reputation by describing the texture of the elephant’s tail to the nth degree and declaring it the only way to understand an elephant.  You get a beating if you try to connect other blind men’s understandings of the elephants and assemble an aggregate picture of the elephant.

Let me put it this way — it’s not the route to tenure.

What this has led to is a dearth of what might be called Integral Theories.  In particular, it’s really led to very few Evolutionary Theories — not about human evolution, mind you — but how ideas evolve, and where the current path of theoretical development will lead.

Because ideas DO lead to other ideas.  When we had a flat Earth, we were limited.  Making the Earth a sphere, and then positioning it revolving around the Sun led to other things.  In hindsight, those insights were predictable.  But those improved understandings emerged naturally from previous work.

Empathy is no different.  So I’m posting my picture of my Emergent and Evolutionary Theory of Empathetic Development.  It’s the picture at the top of this post.  The short version is this:

Mirroring behavior — I yawn, you yawn.

Emotional empathy — I pick a baby up when it’s crying, and sooth it on an emotional level.

Rational empathy — I think about and anticipate your needs without you being in the room.

Global empathy — we are all connected, which is why we care about 300 schoolgirls being kidnapped in Nigeria by Boko Haram.

I’m limiting myself with all my blog posts to be around 500 words.  So I’ll stop.  But now you can see where we’re going.

Takeaway:  Empathy is an evolutionary, emergent phenomena.  And academics can be ridiculous.

Further Reading:  The Age of Empathy, by Frans de Waal.  He’s the grand old man of empathy research, and there are lots of interesting stories in the book.

Note:  this is an old post, that did not properly reference Frans’ matryoshka empathy model in his book.  I’ve updated this in other posts, but wanted to make this clear.

Photo courtesy of Mike Beiser, old friend and brother.

Everyone has heard the nostrum ‘we are all connected.’  And upon hearing such a statement, immediately gets ready for some level of spiritual statement describing that connection.  The description will likely be based on someone’s belief system — from ‘we are connected together with the spiritual energy of the universe’ to ‘the Force is with us’ to ‘we are all brothers and sisters in Christ.’

For all those statements, I have no opinion on others’ beliefs.  But when it gets down to a more brass tacks understanding of connection, we’re much more likely to think of us as complete individuals.  People believe, at some level, in connection — but it’s poorly defined.

But the reality is that we really are all connected.  We are connected as empathetic beings in both space and time, and when I make that statement, I’m not talking about some mythic level of connection.  I’m talking that our brains require connection, in a brass-tacks/reality kind of way.  Research, of course, is ongoing — but there’s some basic ways to understand this that do not require the power of faith.  And I’m ABSOLUTELY not discounting faith.

As a good scientist, I can tell you that the way we examine phenomena we want to study is with limiting cases.  What’s the limiting case for empathy, and what happens to people when they experience that limiting case?  If you’re super-connected, like at a happy Christmas dinner with all your loved ones (and bear with me — I know holiday dinners, for many people, can be stressful, and this is not a shared experience for everyone!) you’re likely to feel a larger sense of peace and well-being.  You’re connected, laughing with people that love you and whom you also love.

But what’s the opposite of that?  Solitary confinement.  You put someone in a hole, you take away all human contact, and even if you feed them, clothe them, and make sure they’re warm, they’ll lose their mind.  Many psychologists and physicians consider solitary confinement extreme torture, and the research supports this.  Our brains need connection with others in order to stay healthy and sane.  We need peoples’ comments, expressions, gestures and touch in order to keep our brains healthy.

Yes — that means you have to have a time-dependent view of connection.  We are not all connected, all of the time, at least in the obvious, physical sense.  But without some dollop of empathetic connection, we lose our minds.

What this leads to is a physical reality of how we are all connected.  And it’s not that spiritual connections don’t matter.  Far from it.  But you don’t need the metaphysical or supernatural to explain connection and our need for it.

Takeaway:  We are on a physical level some aggregate, time-dependent species, joined together physiologically with empathetic connection.  And yes, it’s complicated and doesn’t boil down to simplistic statements well.  

Further reading:  The New Yorker has a series of articles on solitary confinement.  Highly recommended.

If we’re going to get started, we have to get some basics down.  And the biggest is that empathy is NOT sympathy.  I find that whenever I start talking about empathy, folks inevitably think that I’m asking people to feel sorry for other people — or that empathy really means compassion.  Empathy can lead to compassion, or sympathy, but that’s not what it is.

What empathy really means is connection between sentient beings.  And it’s dependent on all sorts of levels of neural function — from the very bottom of the brainstem, to the top of your prefrontal cortex.  How all those things are wired together with your own body will be a post in itself.  The bottom line is that empathy is the connector — the generator of coordinated action among humans.  And empathy, in its many forms, can lead to wonderful positive things, as well as negative things.

Takeaway:  Empathy is not sympathy.  Empathy is about connection.  And often, empathy can be value-neutral — neither good nor evil.  Remember, Darth Vader could feel the Force.

Further reading (and this isn’t great, but it gives a pretty large swath of real estate to think about.  I’ll cover more and less of this as we go on this journey together.)  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathy