The power of a teacup

It is a bit long, but it is totally worth it to listen to it. 

The theory of giving - The feeling behind it.

I know what I have given you... I do not know what you have received.
(Antonio Porchia)

And a touching video about giving back to the one who give. Enjoy it!

Queen Amygdala and the war of stars

   Today we will explore a bio-hack opportunity to improve our nervous system response to the negative and positive things. We will go through some of the recent researches related to amygdala - a small almond-shaped region of the brain. Until recently, the scientists were seeing amygdala as the fear center of the brain, always on lookout for potential threats. Increased activity of this region was linked to depression and anxiety, however, less was known about how amygdala is responding to positive stimuli, and how this activity is relating to feeling positive emotions. 

   William Cuningham (University of Toronto) and Alexander Todorov (Princeton University) explored these new hypotheses. They've discovered that amygdala is implicated in human connection, compassion and happiness. According to their research, the happiest people do not ignore threats. They just might be better at seeing the good. In a fMRI study done last year, Cunningham and his colleagues found that negative images provoke amygdala activity, as expected. But  positive images did as well - but only when the participants were explicitly told to focus on them. This research suggest that people may be able to compensate for their tendency to focus on threats, on negativity, by consciously trying to focus more on the positive ("given the proper ability and motivation, they can show the same sensitivity to positive stimuli", as they automatically do to negative stimuli). Another study that included Cunningham and Todorov, to be published this year, found that amygdala may also be the "heart of compassion", as activity spiked when participants perceived people in need. This was especially true for participants who scored high on empathy. Added to other research that linked the ability to connect with and help others to personal wellbeing, all these studies suggest that humans posses a compassionate instinct that exists even in parts of the brain that are referred as primitive or reptilian. 

   Cuningham and Kirkland sought to determine whether the amygdala of happier people respond differently to positive and negative stimuli when compared with less-happy people. The researchers found that happier people have greater amygdala activation in response to positive stimuli, but they did not have a decreased response to negative ones, as would be predicted by the "rose-colored glasses" theory. 

   It seems that even at a very deep, instinctive level, we are wired to see people in need and help each other out, and that doing so might help us to be happy. 

How not to be kind - the A$$ theory

There are some researches that identified some of the barriers that prevent us to be kind and compassionate. I will just go through them and make a summary for you.

a) being busy - an experiment done at Princeton after a talk about the Good Samaritan and subjects being exposed to an individual who is looking to be suffering of cardiovascular problems - when they got enough time more than 60% stopped and helped, when they were even 2 minutes late, only 10% stopped and helped.

b) violent video games - regardless of the hypothesis that playing violent games increase your violent attitudes, the experimenters observed that playing violent video games regularly will reduce cooperative, kind tendencies.

c) meeting people from apparently different social groups than you - you are more inclined to help someone from the same social group.

d) if we feel that helping is not possible or we do not have the capacity, we will not help, due to the society conditioning of being efficient in what you do.

Extinction of the humanity and the age of independence

In one of his books, Darwin said that we became the top of the food chain, and we evolved as dominant species because we are compassionate and sympathetic as species. We care about others like us, and this made all the difference. Just to think about, our babies take the longest to reach the age of independence - 20-30 years on average until we are not depending of our parents. Most of the animals need one year to achieve the same result.

The problem is, as Sara Konrath research was showing, that empathy and compassion declined in the past 30 years. If we continue on this way, sooner or later we will become extinct as species. This is the beginning. And i will not even start with our leniency towards outsourcing our brain, using technology instead. We are now weaker than ever, even if we think we became stronger.

It is not a joke. It is a wake-up call.

Terms and definitions needed when one study happiness

In order to understand better my following posts, i decided to start by defining few terms that i will use more frequently, and are close to each other.

Kindness - behavior that involve being friendly, generous or considerate;

Pro-social - term favored by scientists to refer to kindness;

Compassion - literally means "suffer together", it is a feeling that arises when you witness another's suffering and feel motivated to help relieve that suffering;

Empathy - ability to sense on imagine other people's emotions;

Sympathy - means "feel together", feeling close to other's emotions, but without the urge to help as in the case of compassion;

Pity - feeling sorry for someone's suffering, but the observer occupies a place of superiority and look down to the one suffering, while in the case of compassion they are equals.

Parenting with style: tips and tricks (1)

As i often find interesting stuff looking for my research, i decided to make small concise posts on my blog and see what others think about. Or maybe even practice a bit.

For today, i will talk about parenting style, secure relations and compassion.

Children in securely attached relations with their parents will show sympathetic behaviour as early as aged three and a half. Abusive parents who resort often to physical violence have less empathetic children.

We got two different parenting styles:
- One is by induction, engaging children in reasoning when they have done harm and prompting them to think about the consequences of their actions and how these actions have harmed others.
- The other is by power assertion, declaring what is good or wrong and resorting to physical punishment and/or strong emotional response of anger.

Children who learn by induction are more adjusted and more likely to help others.

Note: Parents also teach compassion by example.

The vagus nerve, my pride and Tara, the Hindu goddess of compassion

   Just to point our another great alternative way to become more happy, or why we should integrate meditation in our daily routine. The vagus nerve, maybe you heard about it, maybe you don't, also known as the "caretaking" nerve, it is having connections with the oxytocin network, it is linked with a stronger immune response, it regulates your inflammation response, it relates with the interaction between breathing and heart rate, intervene in the digestion process and few other boring pieces of information. 

   What we need to know? The more compassion we feel, the stronger vagus nerve responds, the more pride we feel, the weaker is the response. And we care about this because higher levels of activation of vagus nerve are linked with an increase in positive emotions, more resilience to bereavement, more sympathetic prosociality of children and more trust when we interact with strangers. The vagus nerve strongly relates to altruism and prosociality. And the good news! Higher levels of activation can be cultivated through specialized exercise and meditation. Another good reason to start to do that again. Isn't it?

The vulnerable ape model

Humans are agents capable of helping others, learning new behaviors and forgetting old ones. The evolutionary approach to archaeological systems has therefore been hampered by the 'modern synthesis' - a gene-centered model of evolution as a process that eliminates those that cannot handle stress. The result has been a form of environmental determinism that explains human evolution in terms of heroic struggles and selective winnowing. Biologists committed to the modern synthesis have either dismissed agency as a delusion wrought in our bodies by natural selection, or imposed a sharp, Cartesian split between 'natural' and 'artificial' ecologies.

We revisit the seminal literature of evolutionary biology and show that the paradigmatic fault lines of 21st century anthropology can be traced back to the 19th century and beyond. Lamarck had developed a two-factor evolutionary theory - one factor an endogenous tendency to become more advanced and complex, the other an exogenous constraint that drove organisms into conformity with environment. Darwin tried to eliminate the progressive tendency and imposed linearity constraints on evolution that Thomas Henry Huxley rejected. When experimental evidence falsified Darwin's linear hypothesis, the race began to develop a new, gene-centered model of evolution. This became the modern synthesis.

The modern synthesis is now under pressure from the evidence of anthropology, sociology, paleontology, ecology and genetics. An 'extended synthesis' is emerging.

Read more here