Photo:  Coral Trekker — a sailing ship in the Whitsunday Islands off the Great Barrier Reef, Australia

As we move on up the Empathy Pyramid, we come to the first empathy level that really only showed up in force about 500 years ago.  Now I’ll be the first to tell you — all the empathetic levels have been around forever– kind of waiting to be unlocked in a case of secrets — but in order to become a primary force in society, a critical number of people have to embody them.

Rational empathy is kind of a nested version of what’s called cognitive empathy  by researchers (that link is a paper I’m gonna have to get back to review!)  and embodies all three types of empathy.  Folks in psychology like to call it “place taking”, and that’s an interesting thing to explore.  Namely, because place-taking itself requires some interesting components to be actualized.  First — it involves true consequentiality — it exercises the ‘what if?’ part of your brain, as well as embodying a dynamic, as opposed to static, sense of time.  Second, it requires the beginnings of differentiation and self- separation — the person across from me isn’t me, and I can’t approach what they want from an egocentric perspective.  Finally, it requires of the brain multiple levels of integrated explicit data processing.  If you’re going to have rational empathy, you have to take in the immediate information from that person’s face, and either mirror it back to make them feel comfortable (think about how you’d feel if you were sitting across from someone who was feeling sad, and you were smirking); you’d have to process the information on how they feel (are they happy/sad/etc.); and finally, you’ve got to listen to what they want so they’ll feel that potentially their needs are getting met, or their viewpoint is being heard.

To meet all those things, they also have to react to how you feel and think.  That can go back and forth — and as such, rational empathy is the first primary duplex (two-way) communication mode.

When you sit down to explain a complex idea to someone, you’re going to watch their face and their body language.  And it’s going to take some time.  But here’s the amazing thing.  When you get through that exchange, you both will have the same story.  Rational empathy is a powerful force for information coherence, and is a baseline of higher sentient thought.  You just dump a story on someone, and don’t consider how they feel, there’s no guarantee that what they will tell someone will be what you actually told them.

But when you exercise rational empathy, the odds that your stories are the same starts climbing.

Rational empathy is the backbone of the client/customer relationship, as well as what’s being called ‘design thinking’.  For the math geeks out there, it is the first consistently meta-nonlinear phenomenon, and as a nonlinear phenomenon, opens up all sorts of interesting things in how the social structures that use it process information.  More later!

Takeaways:  rational empathy is the backbone of two-way/duplex communication between sentient agents.  Because it involves both feeling and logical processing, it is the first real whole-brain empathy mode.  It is the foundation of a sophisticated client/customer relationship and what’s being called design thinking.

Further reading:  the Wikipedia page on design thinking is worth reviewing — and will set you up to understand how empathy is applied — even though  they barely mention empathy.  Why that is will be explored…

Caimans — Pantanal, Brazil

If you ask any respectable neuroscientist, they’ll tell you it’s an outdated model — the idea of the triune (three-part) brain, originally developed by Dr. Paul MacLean.  Part of the reason has to be the fMRI, that tool that shows the finer neural structures, enables that endless march of reliability and refinement mentioned earlier, and the fact that when you’ve got a big hunk of something, there has to be more meaning in the details.  But if you respond to authority, though, the famous astronomer and science popularizer, Carl Sagan liked the triune brain enough to write a book about it — The Dragons of Eden.

Here’s the short version.  The brain has three primary groupings, that followed evolutionarily — the so-called reptilian complex, the paleomammalian cortex, and the neomammalian cortex.  The idea is that as the brain evolved, we moved as individuals from automatic-functioning reptiles, to nursing, attachment-based mammals, to thinking primates with big prefrontal cortexes (cortices?)

To be completely honest, I haven’t read Dr. MacLean’s nor Sagan’s book.  But I doubt that they paid much more than a passing mention to empathy.  There are reasons for that that we’ll get to. And while I love the model, I hate the names.  Anyone that’s seen the dude on the Internet that has a crocodile as a pet knows that something’s going on there connection-wise.  That croc has got more than the reptilian complex.  It’s more than mirroring behavior, and probably more than just a little emotional empathy.  It’s trans-species, but even folks that have dogs get a little nervous when you throw a reptile into the mix.

One of the things that we’re really uncomfortable with are evolutionary ideas or paradigms.  We’re still fighting over whether humans were created in a day about 6000 years ago, or emerged from proto-humans on the plains of Africa over 1.6 million years ago. And people who might even be comfortable with evolution still want to refer to the accepted randomness of it all — that arbitrary mutations were naturally selected by large, natural forces to create fitter and fitter organisms, that apparently we happen to luckily be on the top of the heap right now.  At least for us.

But here’s a new concept — that what we’re really seeing (even though it takes a really long time!) is the organization of sentience.  And that sentience takes lots of different forms — from fish, to crocodiles, to humans.  And that sentience is somehow optimized when you group semi-autonomous agents together and balance the exchange of information between those agents.  There are powerful forces of self-organization that take hold.  This isn’t some kind of spiritual mumbo-jumbo, either.  Lots of different insects, when certain resource and spatial concerns pass thresholds, self-organize in all sorts of interesting ways.

All those individual agents are still subject to evolutionary forces, of course.  Imagine it as a race track, where there are a bunch of packs of animals lined up at the starting line of present time, and the gun fires.  Some of the animals have immediate advantage in self-organization — their size, brains/intelligence, and such favor coordination, and they rapidly take off.  They’re in what might known as their ‘In Group’.  And because that exchange of information is so important for pack survival, their empathetic abilities grow over time.  Because that’s what you really need for coordination of all your agents.  It’s a  sensor web, optimizing as time passes.

Some animals are handicapped in this evolutionary race.   They have neither brains nor behaviors that encourage evolutionary empathetic connection, nor adaptability, or maybe only do so modestly.  Exactly how this handicapping works might find a more accessible physical analogy in Stephen Jay Gould’s book The Panda’s Thumb.  In the titular essay, the author, an evolutionary biologist, made the point that a sesamoid bone — a minor bone that grows embedded in tendon or muscle — was the bone that grew in size until it turned into the giant panda’s thumb — not a well-formed thumb at all, but one the evolved as the animal, a large bear, turned more and more to a bamboo diet.

We humans probably had a little luck in having the right combination of size, need for coordination, and resources in our evolutionary journey for emergent brain function that required empathy.  Our brains, with their structure, likely favored our transition to processing-in-software that we see in our pre-frontal cortex, than the processing-in-hardware of our limbic and cerebellar and autonomic nervous systems.  Empathetic connection, as we will discuss, played heavily on all the data processing that developed even further the pre-frontal cortex.  Never forget that developing empathetic connection requires tremendous amounts of data processing — basic empathy involves watching other sentient beings just like you, taking the data, processing it, and then reacting or acting in either an automatic and/or socially acceptable and pro-active ways.  And brains are no different than any other organ — it’s use-it or lose-it.  Make no bones about it — empathetic connection (especially rational empathy — stay tuned) develops the rational mind.

But an interesting thing happened back at the race track.  Our empathetic connection abilities jumped out of the pack.  We broadened our definition of what an ‘In Group’ might look like.  We roped dogs, horses, cows, and even cats onto our team.  From the beginning, tribal social structures found empathetic connection of varying degrees with an assortment of animal animuses. As we develop even in the current era, our software and social organizations create empathetic connections to all sorts of species, all over the planet.  Though imperfect, we pass Endangered Species Acts, and biodiversity initiatives.  Through empathetic sharing networks of our own creation, we started realizing the importance of all of these beings.  And some of them, that have the capacity, have reconnected back to us.

Yeah, it’s not true for all humans.  It may be that it’s not true for ENOUGH humans.  But anyone that doesn’t believe that this can happen needs to go meet Jane Goodall.

If there’s a simple point, it’s this.  Evolution and empathy go hand-in-hand.  The more connections we make, the better.  The more profound connections, the even-better better.  And at the same time that we appreciate the evolution of our own neural structures, we need to also understand that others’ neural structures are also evolving, and that the forces of self-organization and information coherence are also at play in the evolutionary picture.  And while there may be random elements at play, and the biological structures are not quite the same, they are definitely not arbitrary.

But sentience follows a clear path — though the steps along the path may not be transparent, nor constant.  Sentience is rewarded through integration of greater and greater amounts of information, with greater coherence and error detection.

That’s the real lesson of the triune brain.

Takeaway:  Sentience is evolutionary, and the self-organization that it prompts is a guiding principle in evolution.  Ostensibly independent agents will coordinate behavior, and evolve brains that allow coordination of behavior to gain evolutionary advantage.  And when they get to a certain point, they’ll leap out of the ‘only our species matters’ box and bring other sentient beings along — if they have any sense.

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