Well, That Explains Ben Stein

Got prosody?

"In linguistics, prosody (from Greek προσῳδία, prosōidía) is the rhythm, stress, and intonation of speech." (Wikipedia)

Seems "sing-song" is now a compliment, as researchers, (including those at something called the "Brain and Creativity Institute") find that those with lotsa musical inflection in their voices (and those who can perceive such) are more empathic. Meanwhile, verbal flatliners are emotionally tone deaf, so take heed.

Says Simon

Movies on the family brain: As Sascha's Avatar skit gets canned by Oscar, eruditer cuz SBC (Simon Baron-Cohen) is talkin' Blade Runner-n- iris scanning over on HuffP.

In reference to the aforeposted tome, The Empathic Civilization, Simon ponders a future in which there's testing for empathy and cautions that what looks like e may not always be e, but rather, moral rule-following, convention, acting -- or even shyness.

"What if we hold doors open, or hand in wallets, or give birthday presents for the same reasons we use a knife and fork to eat, or drive on the left, or stop at a red traffic light?"

But don't worry, science to the rescue:

"As yet there is no fool-proof test of empathy, yet given its growing importance within cognitive neuroscience, it won't be long before there is one. The advent of functional neuroimaging is making it possible to see beneath surface behaviour, to establish if the typical neural circuitry for empathy is (or is not) being employed, when someone says they care."

Ooooh, I can't wait.

The Big Picture

New paperback out: The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis, by Jeremy Rifkin.

Sorta explains why we really gotta care about why we care. 'Bout how we gotta get our empathic asses in gear in this flat world. Kinda backs up the idea that empathy matters on a bigger scale, has a bigger role to play, not just in our own mini-dramas, as it were. He argues we've gone from the Age of Spirituality, to the Age of Reason, to the Age of Empathy. I haven't read it yet, but here's some quotes from a Huffington Post piece:

"In the modern era, with its emphasis on rationality, objectivity, detachment, and calculability, human emotions are considered irrational, quixotic, impossible to objectify, not subject to detached evaluation, and difficult to quantify. Even today, it is common lore not to let one's emotions get in the way of sound reasoning and judgment. How many times have we heard someone say or have said to someone else, 'Try not to be so emotional . . . try to behave more rationally.'"

"New developments in evolutionary biology, cognitive science, and psychology are laying the groundwork for a wholesale reappraisal of human consciousness. The premodern notion that faith and God's grace are the windows to reality and the Enlightenment idea that reason is at the apex of modern consciousness are giving way to a more sophisticated approach to a theory of mind."

"In the empathic civilization, spirituality invariably replaces religiosity. Spirituality is a deeply personal journey of discovery in which empathic experience--as a general rule--becomes the guide to making connections, and becomes the means to foster transcendence."

"Reason too can be salvaged from its disembodied Enlightenment roots and be recast within an embodied empathic frame...Reason includes mindfulness, reflection, introspection, contemplation, musing, and pondering, as well as rhetorical and literary ways of thinking. Reason is all of this and more."

And Spice

There's an old home movie of a very unempathic person I know. In it, she's only about four. She's got bangs and dimples, riding a tricycle in what I would call rather agressive circles. And something else. There's this glint in her eye, this look of -- what? It's definitely adult-like, knowing, too grown-up. It appears as though she may be plotting the overthrow of -- whom? Her family, her town, our world? It's really a very scary look, especially if you know how she turned out. She is not an axe murderer, I am happy to report. But you would not be better off knowing her, and if you were a sensitive person or dependent on her in any way, you might be much worse.

So is it nature or nurture? I don't know, but I have my suspicions. I think she was this way from the start; her environment just let it blossom. I'm fairly sure nobody in her family ever told her to "be nice." Just wasn't in them, not people oriented to the internal life of children at all. I bet as long as she did fine in school and didn't physically attack anyone, as long as she didn't overtly SHAME them (she didn't), she was left, as were her siblings, to say and do what they wanted to each other and other kids. But the meanness, the total lack of empathy, it was there. In her. Deeply. And by that I mean in her genes, hormones, brain structure, whatever. And how-oh-how can we dislodge this from people such as this?

Which brings me to Jane Brody's recent New York Times piece, in which we learn that her grandson is a nice little boy and that to foster empathy we need to explain to children, explicitly, how their bad behavior impacts others and makes life less fun for them.

Hey, I'm all for trying.

Lookin' Good

O.K., so he studies the vaginal fatty acids of menstruating chimpanzees.

Dr. Ryo Oda (ahem) is also the author of a study that found that, well, really nice people look that way to others. (One clue: they smile a lot, genuinely.)

Ordinary college students, men and women, were able to distinguish which people were super-good (scoring in the top 10% for altruism) and which were super-not (bottom 10%), just from watching 30-second, silent videos of them talking.

So what about true psychopaths, thought to be masters at masking their true natures?

They're only .06 percent of the population; perhaps none found their way into the study.

Saxe Appeal

She's baaack. My girl crush continues with this latest TED video featuring the empress of MIT's eponymous Saxelab, Rebecca Saxe.

Saxe studies human theory of mind and morality.

She discusses her experiment involving the hypothetical case of a white powder that is either labeled "poison" but is sugar or labeled "sugar" but is poison.

How much moral blame a subject assigns someone who places the powder in a friend's coffee in each scenario can actually be altered by running magnetic currents through the subject's RBTJ, a part of the brain that controls moral reasoning.

After her presentation, the moderator says he hopes Saxe isn't taking any calls from the Pentagon on her work.

"I'm not. I mean, they're calling, but I'm not taking the call," quips Becks.

Love her.

Too Much of a Good Thing

Is it possible to be too empathic, too tuned in to what others are feeling and thinking, even to point where it impairs your functioning?

Sure, this is America, any excess is possible.

Columbia researchers have found that folks with Borderline Personality Disorder are better than the general population at reading the expression in other people's eyes -- and, gosh darn it, they're not always made happy by what they see.

Too much emotional information can be a real downer -- especially if you find yourself in a crowd of psychopaths or traumatized war veterans.

In fact, an overabundance of empathy may be what causes BPD in the first place.

Take the test to gauge your own ocular reading skills.

Fresh Err

What, exactly, is wrong with shorn-n-horn-rimmed talk temptress Terry Gross (Fresh Air)?

Does she, like, have any human emotions -- at all?

I swear she's on the autism spectrum.

Just today on the radio, she goes (paraphrase)"hmm you seem to be showing a lot of emotion while talking about your difficult past," to poor Tracy Morgan (30 Rock). She went all Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory on him, outing him for crying during the interview in the flattest of tones.

She's known for asking refreshingly simple, basic questions. Uh, I'm starting to think it's because she's sorta simple herself -- at least in the EQ department.

Meh, she's long-married with no children. This is public radio, I mean, if you can't have kids, adopt a discontinued toaster. Adopt something. No, Terry has no need for diminutive love objects. Which makes the thousands of conversations she's had with her (mostly) touchy-feely guests about their adorable children (and myriad attending child-rearing issues) kinda weird, 'cause you know the whole time she's thinking: "So glad I don't have kids, so glad, soooo very glad."

In other news, Duke researchers have found out that autistic peeps have less sensitivity to oxytocin (used to treat the condition), about 30% less that regs, 'cause of higher-than-usual numbers of gene-regulating molecules called methyl groups. Some of this may be inherited; they're looking into it.

Did I mention that I know a family in which the women are simply unable to breastfeed? They just don't have it in 'em. (Very rare.) Oxytocin triggers the let-down effect in breastfeeding and other maternal behaviors -- or doesn't. These are some cold beyotches. And the male, breast-n-love-deprived children of the family -- they some cold mfers.

Creature Comforts

So, here comes this new book, The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society, by Frans de Waal, which seems to draw upon examples of animal empathy to prove its existence in humans. I haven't read the thing yet, but at this (albeit early) stage, it begs the question for me: What about "Lessons from Our Own Human History and Experience," (I'm thinking Rawanda, BTK, Pol Pot)? I mean, how far can animals really take us in understanding ourselves, versus, say, looking at how people actually treat other people?

Now, I often refer to animal studies and will continue to do so, but I do so tongue-partly-in-cheek -- or wasn't that obvious? -- and partly because that's what's available in the empathy studies game. But I mean, we are some very special animals. And I have to believe that the behavior we observe in mice and even primates, while helpful, can take us only so far in explicating human ways versus studying, well, actual people. I mean, whatever "the difference that makes the difference" is, why we are the way we are, why we have culture and art and the Internet and shoes (caused by the advent of charred food, allowing our jaws to get smaller and our brains bigger as argued in Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human?), well, whatever it is, by now, it's a pretty big difference. We have diverged. And how. Big time. And how we treat one another can't fully be explained or excused by other critters' codes of conduct. We will not be shamed by dolphins and whales!

We're gonna have to shame ourselves.

Moral Arguments

Thanks for the comments on the Father Land post.

Also wanted to point people to a germane TED talk by Jonathan Haidt about the moral mind, politics and personality.

He compares how different political persuasions define "morality" differently, giving varying weight to five basic values: Harm/care, Fairness/reciprocity, Ingroup/loyalty, Authority/respect, and Purity/sanctity.

Ingroup, Authority and Purity show the greatest disparity between left and right. For example, on a question about choosing a dog, Conservatives prefered a dog who was loyal but not warm to strangers, whereas Liberals went for a dog who was independent-minded and related to its owner as an equal.

Oh, and here's a quiz you can take to participate in Haidt's morality research.

While we're on the TED track, here's a truly jarring presentation by (the rather devilish-looking) psychologist Philip Zimbardo (author of the famed Stanford prison study and The Lucifer Effect) about how good soldiers turned bad at Abu Graib.

It includes VERY graphic pictures taken by the American reservists themselves of the torture they commited on prisoners. Horrifying!

He tries to explain how even previously normal people can commit dispicably evil acts.

It boils down to a kind of circumstantial group think and the power of authority. People will do things within anonymous organizational frameworks they would never do on their own. (Even so, some outliers do stand up and refuse.)

He advocates promoting everyday heroism among children.