While the age of social media appears to have ushered in an exciting new era of human connectivity and communication, it appears ominously clear that somehow compassion and empathy may be falling to the wayside. Every-day tragedies attract spectators jostling for the best perspective to live-stream the event, but frustratingly few are willing to step in and engage with those in need, and millions of people live their daily lives crammed into writhing metropolises while managing to avoid sustained eye-contact and meaningful conversations with anyone else for days (and longer) on end.
In his presentation at TED2007, Daniel Goleman draws a continuous line from “complete self-absorption, to noticing, to empathy and compassion” as a path to improving social health, suggesting that our growing tendency to immerse ourselves in our own thoughts and our digital devices at the loss of social interaction has led to a weakening of the social fabric that has traditionally connected humans through history.
The concept of a “social fabric” has become even more tangible as science has opened the door to social neuroscience and explores the incredible ways that our biological neuro-systems interact at a social level – including the physiological processes in which our very thought patterns are conveyed to and eventually mirrored by others through our daily interactions. Studies such as those undertaken by the the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience are exploring how even observing someone else in pain activates areas of our brains related to tactile functionality and emotional response, as if we ourselves were experiencing that pain. A recent study led by Valeria Gazzola and Christian Keysers introduced pain to a subject and allowed another subject to decrease the pain by performing the altruistic act of donating money to decrease the pain. Typically, more pain resulted in the subject giving more generously to decrease the pain, but by manipulating the activity of tactile function, the researchers observed that “(a) people became less able to perceive in how much pain the other person was and (b) they no longer adapted their donations as appropriately to the needs of the other.”
Studies like this suggest that there is a clear correlation between empathy for pain and constructive social behavior at a neurological level, which could potentially lead to discovering and developing methods to improve individual empathy as a path towards improving social cohesion across many scales of interaction including family, community, workplace and even regional/national environments. The thought that the Golden Rule paraphrased as “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” seems to quickly be gaining even more significance than just a general societal guideline and appears to be deeply rooted in what may become a clearly-defined neurological and physiological law of nature is certainly an exciting proposition, and may potentially have incredibly profound impacts on our society.
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