Feelings Without Borders
His surroundings had become so familiar to him that without noticing it, he was assuming some of the habits of the people who lived here.
GEORGES SIMENON, MAIGRET AND THE MAID (FELICE EST LÀ)
VITTORIO GALLESE MADE THE DISCOVERY OF HIS life while working as a prison doctor. What he really wanted to do was research, but since he couldn’t get a position at the university in his hometown of Parma, Italy, the young doctor put bread on the table by working in a prison. He was on service at night and on the weekends, treating hardened criminals. During the day he worked without compensation in his lab. Of course, he knew all about what his patients had done. The whole town knew their stories, because everyone convicted of a major crime anywhere in the province did their time in Parma. But Gallese felt no revulsion for the prisoners. On the contrary, he felt sympathy for them because they were ill, even if the patient happened to be a hit man or a serial killer who had dissolved his victims in acid. The guards were always asking him why he put himself out for these criminals, but he couldn’t explain his feelings.
It wasn’t until many years later that he was able to describe what must have been going on inside him at the time. “If I’d only read about the criminals in the news, I too probably would have felt nothing but repugnance for the killers. But those men stood before me in the flesh, talked about their wives, had a personal history as I did,” Gallese told me when I visited him at the University of Parma in 2007. In the meantime he had become a professor. “They weren’t completely alien beings. And, not least of all, we shared an environment. Seven doors closed behind me on the way from the street to my office; I knew what it was like to be cut off from the outside world. Because I ultimately lived with them, it wasn’t hard for me to put myself into my patients’ shoes. . . . As a doctor, I was there to heal, not to judge.”1 In his free time, Gallese did research with rhesus monkeys. To find out how the cerebrum gives instructions to the muscles, he and his colleagues had attached electrodes to some gray cells in the monkeys’ brains. (The animals couldn’t feel anything because the brain is not susceptible to pain. Still, any animal used for research suffers from being caged its whole life. The important insights that scientists have gained in this and other experiments involving animals in captivity come at a cost that requires serious ethical consideration.) Whenever the monkeys reached for food, certain brain cells were activated. The researchers’ instruments would start crackling. But then something strange occurred. “When I myself at one point extended my arm toward the nuts,” said Gallese, “the crackle occurred too—as if the monkey had moved. But it was only watching quietly. At first, of course, we thought there had been a mistake.” But the signal was repeated every time the animal saw Gallese reaching for food. “After a while we realized that the monkey’s brain actually behaves as if it were putting itself in our shoes. When an animal observes another’s movements, the observer’s neurons mirror the other’s behavior. That’s why we called them mirror neurons.”2 It took Gallese years to understand the connection between the signals from the brains of his monkeys and his feelings as a prison doctor. For a long time, he and his colleagues thought only that they had discovered an astonishing specialization of the parts of the brain that regulate movement. The monkeys clearly owed their gift for imitation to the mirror neurons. These cells were probably also responsible for an amusing peculiarity of newborn rhesus monkeys: If you make a face or stick out your tongue in front of the tiny animals, barely bigger than a human hand, they will imitate you.
Later it turned out that the mirror neurons can do even more. They also helped the monkeys recognize why another being is making a particular movement. Some of the neurons fire as soon as a monkey guesses that a human is reaching for nuts, even if the animal cannot see the food. Different mirror neurons turn on when the human is reaching for a bottle instead of nuts, although the gesture is the same.3 The animal guesses the human’s intention as though reading his mind.
Was the same mechanism at work in human brains? Everything suggested it was. Yet it was not until the spring of 2010, fifteen years after Gallese’s first publications on the topic, that neurophysiologists in California succeeded in identifying individual mirror neurons in the human brain.4 What is more, however, they discovered the curious gray cells not only in the centers that control movement, but also in an unexpected location: in parts of the cerebral cortex responsible for memory.
This seems convincing proof that mirror neurons are involved in much more than just our motor functions. Rather, these cells also mirror others’ feelings. When we see—or even just hear about—someone else suffering pain, our brains react as though our own body were feeling it, too.
The neurons that Gallese and his colleagues first discovered in rhesus monkeys are much more than just a mirror. With their help, we experience the suffering of others as our own, as though the border between self and other were temporarily blurred. And since this kind of empathy is involuntary, it makes no difference if the other is a friendly neighbor or one of Gallese’s killers.
Empathy Creates Trust
Leading brain researchers ranked the discovery of mirror neurons alongside that of the genetic function of DNA.5 And it really does upend many traditional notions of how our life together functions. Sympathy, for example, is not produced in order to make others obligated to us by doing them a good deed; it happens involuntarily. That does away with the suspicion that neo-Darwinists like the American author Robert Wright have promulgated as a piece of cynical wisdom: “The more desperate the plight of the beneficiary, the larger the I.O.U. Exquisitely sensitive sympathy is just highly nuanced investment advice.”6 The neo-Darwinists were convinced that a truly sympathetic person would always be at a disadvantage to someone who was hard-hearted and calculating. But isn’t it possible that the opposite is true? As we have seen in the preceding chapter, success often depends on the ability to engender trust, and only people who understand their interlocutors can gain their trust. Nor is it enough to understand intellectually what motivates the other. Rather, our frequently invoked “social intelligence” is based on a talent for putting ourselves in the other’s shoes emotionally. The trust game we examined reveals how resonance can develop between the brains of two players and help both to succeed. The mirror neurons play a major role in this phenomenon.
These gray cells themselves are only part of a recently discovered empathic system. Its circuits operate in a quite different way than strategic intelligence. They ensure that we are “infected” by others’ emotions, that we can imagine ourselves in their place, that we understand our fellow humans and feel sympathy for them. All of these various impulses constitute empathy—our ability to put ourselves inside others’ circumstances. Without empathy, our affections, communal life, and willingness to help one another would be unthinkable. Cooperation and trust both depend upon it.
Contrary to what people have often thought, empathy is not a complex achievement of our intellect or something we must labor to acquire. Rather, it develops automatically. It’s as natural for us to empathize with others as it is to eat, drink, and breathe.
And just as it takes work to hold your breath, it takes a conscious effort to watch unmoved as someone suffers. Physicians and therapists are well acquainted with just how much effort it takes to protect themselves from an overdose of others’ misfortune, confronted as they are every day with their patients’ suffering. More than a few of them fail to maintain an adequate border around their own psyches.
Even if we witness a catastrophe only on the nightly news and see the despairing faces of victims in a distant part of the world, we want to help. And who was not moved when Steven Spielberg’s poor imaginary creature E.T. felt homesick and wanted to phone home?
Fortunately, we share not only in others’ suffering, but in their good feelings as well. The American sociologists Nicholas Christakis and James H. Fowler even claim to have calculated that every happy friend raises our own well-being by an average of nine percent (every unhappy friend, however, lowers it by seven percent).7
“Something Pulled My Arm Up”
It is impossible for football fans to stay seated when the hometown boys have scored a touchdown and thousands jump to their feet and cheer. As if a magic power emanated from all the others, your legs seem to have a will of their own. Even before you’re conscious of moving, you find yourself standing up and shouting. Sometimes others’ excitement even exerts its influence in the privacy of our own living room via television. When the cameras pan to the cheering fans, the home viewer jumps off her couch as if spring-loaded, only to notice with some embarrassment that she’s all by herself.
We are constantly receptive to the feelings of others. And since the mirroring mechanism in our head imitates what we observe in them, we often automatically copy the facial expressions, gestures, and tone of voice of our interlocutor. The fact that we so readily adopt the signals of others produces sympathy and the urge to help, but it also can lead to experiences like that of my Austrian grandfather. He told me that during the Anschluss in 1938, when the Nazis marched into Austria and incorporated it into the German Reich, he stood in the midst of the cheering crowd and “something simply pulled my arm up.” Even my politically conservative but by no means nationalistic grandfather raised his hand in the Hitler salute before he realized what he was doing. Of course, that does not exonerate all the people who kept their arms up for so long. After all, good sense can pull the emergency brake as soon as we become conscious that a foreign force we find repulsive wants to take possession of our body, our mind, and our feelings.
But the fact that we are so often “infected” by others is the price we pay for our ability to learn. A person who was immune to any outside influence would simply be unable to exist. She would fail at the simplest acts of daily life. The only reason we can wash ourselves, tie our shoes, and talk is that we learned how by imitation. It happens fastest when the brain makes the least possible differentiation between what it sees or hears and what it’s supposed to do itself. And that’s exactly what the mirror neurons do; they are responsible for both our perception of others and our own actions. Too strong an ego can at least compromise the ability to learn when it intrudes between the model and the learner.
To find out whether learning really functions that way, Gallese’s colleagues in Parma set up an experiment with students learning to play the guitar. Beginners were supposed to learn new chords a teacher would play for them, while the researchers recorded the learners’ brain activity. And indeed, the same neurons that first reacted to the sight of the teacher’s fingerings also guided the learners’ hands when they played the same chords themselves.8
The fact that humans have incomparably more mirror neurons than do monkeys also suggests that without these brain cells, we would hardly be able to learn anything. A chimpanzee has to watch a long time before it can learn to use stones to crack open a nut, something a three-year-old child can learn in a few minutes. And finally, we also find mirror neurons in the brain’s language centers. We obviously owe it to them that we can easily imitate the sounds and words we hear. Songbirds learn their songs in the same way. Young canaries and sparrows have mirror neurons in their tiny heads and listen to the melodies of their elders as if they were producing them themselves—until they can.9
Emotional Susceptibility
Like a yawn or a tune you can’t get out of your head after someone else has whistled it, smiles are contagious. Since emotions are communicated by the body, there is a direct path from imitation to sympathy, an idea which had already occurred to Leonardo da Vinci. By watching and involuntarily mirroring the gestures of others, we also adopt their feelings. Armed with this insight, Leonardo breathed life into the Last Supper and the Mona Lisa. “The most important consideration of the painter is that the movement of every figure expresses the condition of their spirit, such as yearning, scorn, annoyance, sympathy, and so on. . . . Otherwise, it is not good art.”10 A work is successful when it causes similar feelings in the viewer. “If the picture portrays terror, fear, flight, mourning, weeping, and wailing or pleasure, joy, laughter, and similar conditions, the mind of the viewers should induce their limbs to move so that they think they are in the same situation as the figures in the picture.”11
Five hundred years after Leonardo wrote these lines, they were confirmed by the discovery of the mirror neurons in our brains. When we see a smiling mouth, those cells order our own facial muscles to smile. And because our brains generally derive feelings from the condition of our bodies, they interpret this impulse to smile as the expression of our own happiness.12 We don’t even have to really change the position of our mouth, for the actual movement is frequently suppressed at a later stage of processing in the brain. But the signal for the emotion is retained: The mere sight of a happy face lifts our spirits.
At such moments we usually don’t even know why we feel good, since “catching” an emotion from another happens without help from our conscious mind.13 Newborns begin to cry when they hear another baby crying. (Years ago, when all newborns were placed in a common room, this effect could set off a real cacophany.) Monkeys also adopt the feelings of others, as the American primatologist Lisa Parr established by showing videos to her charges. Some videotapes were about chimpanzees happily at play, while others showed scenes of monkeys getting injections or being shot with tranquilizer darts. Animals that have grown up in captivity know and hate the latter situations. The watching chimps reacted as if it were happening to them. Sensors showed that when they watched the threatening scenes, their skin temperature dropped—their equivalent of a cold sweat.
Even the much less intelligent rhesus monkeys are susceptible to the emotions of others. In one experiment, behavioral researchers planned to reward the animals with food whenever the monkeys gave other monkeys harmless but unpleasant electrical shocks. The shockers were able to hear the shrieks of the shockees. The experiment had to be terminated because one of the monkeys preferred to do without the food for twelve days rather than cause another monkey—familiar to him—to suffer the shocks.14
But what advantage is there in this impulse to share the pleasant and unpleasant feelings of others? This question probably never consciously arose during the development of primates: The characteristic was simply there at some point. The emotional impulse resulted from the fact that primates in general and humans in particular are extremely good learners. And if we can “infect” each other with gestures and behavior, it was almost inevitable that we could infect each other with feelings as well.15
The usefulness of this trait was quickly obvious. If an animal hears the terrified screams of another and itself reacts with fear, then it may escape in time not to end up in the belly of a predator. And if a little girl has unpleasant feelings when she sees a playmate get stung when he touches some nettles, then she probably won’t want to try it out for herself. Evolution doesn’t ask if a solution is the most efficient; it simply preserves what works.
The prerequisite for emotional susceptibility, however, is that our perception of our own feelings is in good working order. Otherwise, even the smartest of us couldn’t share the feelings of others. And that’s what happens to people when a head injury has affected the regions of their brain that oversee the body. They cannot feel pain and remain unmoved by a film of someone in extreme agony.16
Blind Spots in the Mirror
But as long as our self-awareness is intact, we don’t even need to see a face contorted in pain. Our stomach turns over if a friend merely tells us how she banged her thumbnail with a hammer while trying to hang a picture. We’re even more affected if she shows us the blackened nail. We are quite capable of imagining what she must have felt and making the experience of the hammer hitting her thumb our own. This feeling is more complicated and far-reaching than emotional susceptibility. It is what we call empathy. In this hypothetical case, we do not experience our friend’s pain as if our own thumb had been hit. Our feeling remains abstract in a curious way. We feel uncomfortable, but the trigger—the physical pain itself—is not present. The reaction in our head is also incomplete in a certain sense. A feeling such as pain consists of various components for which different areas of the brain are responsible. Thus one circuit evaluates whether an event is pleasant or unpleasant, another recognizes which parts of the body have been affected, and a third center provides the feeling of pain itself. Finally, the brain assembles these signals and allows us to tell a headache from a leg cramp.
But when we empathize, only the first of those circuits is activated, creating a diffuse unpleasant feeling. The other components are absent, as the Zurich neuropsychologist Tania Singer has been able to show.17 In the brain of the person who sees or hears about the pain of another, neither the feeling of physical pain nor the assignment of the emotion to a particular part of the body takes place. Thus when we empathize with someone, we’re not experiencing an exact copy of what that person feels. The mirror has blind spots.
That distinguishes empathy from emotional susceptibility. If a movie makes us cry when the heroine cries, we are at that moment feeling the same grief she does, as if the same disaster had happened to us. If we have empathy with her, we can understand her feelings but we know her pain is not ours.
The rationale for empathy is obvious: It makes it easier to understand others. For where conscious thought takes detours and often ends up on the wrong track, the gift of empathy grants direct access to another person’s interior world. Someone who has never lived with children, for example, may have an abstract idea of what a father must feel when his little daughter learns to ride a bicycle. But only someone who has had the experience himself comprehends the father’s feelings concretely. You don’t need to explain to him that strange mixture of joy, a little fear, and enormous pride. Few words are needed; you look at each other and you understand what the other is thinking.
But whether they come from empathy or emotional susceptibility, feelings are communicated automatically. We are incapable of deciding not to cry in Gone with the Wind. And we are involuntarily shocked when we see the photograph of a badly injured person. But just as my grandfather was capable of suppressing (and hopefully did suppress) the spontaneously triggered Hitler salute, we often must stifle our feelings in the face of others’ misery, or we would not be able to bear the suffering of the world.
We are capable of regulating emotions that occur automatically, to admit them or close ourselves off to them. The closer we are to others and the more sympathetic we find them, the more likely we are to open our hearts. Experienced hitchhikers look directly into the eyes of approaching motorists in order to soften their hearts. The American social psychologist Mark Snyder found that by doing so, they double their chances of being picked up.18 And anyone who has found himself in the same situation as a person who is seeking help is more likely to sympathize with him. This is one of the reasons for Vittorio Gallese’s feelings as a prison doctor: Being together under lock and key created a bond.
A frightening way to experience the various stages of empathy is to watch the videos of the execution of Nicolae Ceauşescu or Saddam Hussein on the Internet. The scenes are so oppressive it feels like we are being executed ourselves. But as gruesome as the tyrants’ end may be, not many viewers will feel sorry for them. The knowledge of all the people they had murdered keeps us from being touched by the images of their own violent deaths.
Who’s going to sympathize with a monster when something bad happens to him? Men don’t, at any rate, as we learn from another study by Singer.19 When men learned that someone who has treated them unfairly is getting a very unpleasant electric shock, their brains show almost no pain reaction. On the contrary, synapses concerned with feelings of pleasure are activated, as though the men were feeling schadenfreude. Apparently it is different with women. Their brains signal pity even for individuals they have had bad experiences with in the past. No one has yet adequately explained this difference between the sexes. Nor is there any evidence that women act any more helpfully or selflessly than men.
Samaritans in a Hurry
Even people who deal professionally with morality are capable of turning off—or even not noticing—their empathy at crucial moments. The American social psychologist and theologian David Batson conducted an experiment that leads one to question the moral effects of religion in everyday life. At the same time, it confirms a central parable of the Gospel story.
Batson asked forty students at the Princeton Theological Seminary to analyze the parable of the Good Samaritan. A man on his way from Jerusalem to Jericho is attacked, beaten, and robbed, and lies half dead in the road. A priest comes by, sees him, and continues on his way. Obviously he fears making himself unclean by touching the corpse of a stranger, for in Mosaic law, priests may touch only the corpses of their own relatives. Next comes a Levite, a scholar of Jewish law, who also passes by without helping. Finally, a Samaritan, the member of a despised minority, comes upon the man. He feels compassion and acts accordingly: He washes and bandages the man’s wounds, takes him to an inn, and pays for his care.
The students were to prepare oral presentations on this parable in which Jesus illustrates the principle of love for one’s fellow humans. On their way to class to give the presentations, the students encountered exactly what is supposed to have once happened between Jerusalem and Jericho. A man sat on a stoop, hunched over and racked with pain. (The students did not know he was an actor only feigning distress.) How did they react? Exactly as described in the Gospel of Luke: They passed by without coming to his aid. “Indeed, on several occasions, a seminary student going to give his talk on the parable of the Good Samaritan literally stepped over the victim as he hurried on his way!” writes Batson.20 Only sixteen of the forty pastors-to-be offered any help at all. As a control, Batson had some of the subjects prepare a talk about their future professional expectations rather than about the parable of the Good Samaritan and in addition asked about his subjects’ religious attitudes. But neither the subject to be discussed nor the strength of their religious beliefs had any effect on whether they helped the victim or not. What made a difference instead was a sobering variable. Students who were given more time by the investigators to get to their presentations were more willing to come to the aid of the victim, but students who were in a hurry almost always ignored him.
The Spirit in the Machine
“The most compassionate person is the best person, the one most likely to display all the social virtues and all manner of unselfish behavior. Thus who ever awakens our sympathy makes us better and more virtuous.”21
This simple equation was how the Enlightenment dramatist Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781) explained why going to the theater to see a tragedy is an ennobling experience. Tragedies “expand our ability to feel sympathy,” and thus our moral faculties are also developed.
Was Lessing right? A frequent misunderstanding is the belief that only when our inner feelings are affected can we do something for someone else. A poorly paid public defender is undoubtedly acting magnanimously when she gives a passionate closing argument in a murder trial, but the fate of the accused doesn’t necessarily have to affect her deeply. She might even be convinced that the prisoner is guilty and find him completely despicable. Nevertheless, she is able to use all her eloquence to argue the man’s innocence, even if she does so only because a case that lacks compelling evidence goes against her sense of justice. To be sure, the wise Lessing did not claim that sympathy was the prerequisite for caring for others. Sympathy and willingness to help are two different impulses.
It is important to differentiate sympathy from both emotional susceptibility and empathy. First, empathy can serve not just selfless aims but also terrible ones. Torturers, for example, use exactly their capacity for empathy to torment their victims in especially sadistic ways. Second, we would hardly consider it sympathetic if in an argument we get infected by the anger of our opponent and begin to shout ourselves. Thus, emotional susceptibility and empathy are no guarantee that we will either feel compassion or help others. Both only orient themselves by the apparent feelings of others, and arise only because those emotions are expressed by the body.
But compassion means also taking into account what the other person is not showing, for instance—let’s say in an argument between spouses—the other’s disappointment and wish for a conciliatory gesture. While empathy perceives only the emotive surface of the other, compassion is concerned with understanding another person. In order to look behind the facades of our fellow humans, we try to exchange roles with them in spirit. In an American Indian expression, the person who shows sympathy “walks in another’s moccasins.” Lessing speaks of the “fear that we ourselves could become the object of sympathy.” For in trying to imagine how we would feel in someone else’s place, we must not give too much importance to that person’s visible feelings, which threaten to “infect” us. Only by controlling our emotional susceptibility are we able to calm others’ fury or comfort them in their despair.
Adopting a stranger’s point of view in our mind is consequently carried out by different centers in the brain than those controlling empathy. Among others, an area called the posterior superior temporal cortex (pSTC) contributes to our ability to think our way into others’ minds. Its original task was much more elementary, namely, to predict complicated movements of objects. A cat uses it to guess in what direction a mouse will run. In interactions with others, it is especially the folds of our brain behind the right temple that carry out a similar but more abstract assignment. They become active whenever other people appear to be acting in a purposeful and goal-oriented way. Thus with the help of the pSTC, we assign meaning to our observations of what other people are doing. Thus we owe our insights into the inner life of others neither to our conscious reason nor to our feelings. Rather, we acquire them intuitively.
The American neuroscientist Scott Huettel has studied the connection between selflessness and this intuitive understanding.22 He gave his subjects a task that seemed to have nothing at all to do with sympathy for one’s fellows. They were supposed to watch a computer play a video game against itself. The knowledge that the winnings would be donated to a good cause was apparently enough for the subjects to attribute goal-directed action to the machine. At any rate, the pSTC was activated. (In earlier rounds, when the subjects tried the game themselves or when only points rather than money were at stake, this area of the brain was not involved.) Some subjects seemed more inclined than others to see intelligence in the machine, and their pSTC correspondingly showed more than average activity. And it was precisely these subjects who showed themselves to have a particularly altruistic attitude in other tests.
How much people devote themselves to others would accordingly have less to do with their emotional empathy than with their intellectual ability to interpret the intentions and motives of others. This suggests a surprising corollary: The person who has difficulty understanding others is condemned to egocentrism. Looking only to your own advantage, then, would be a form of not just emotional but also intellectual narrowness.
Of course, empathy and the intellectual exchange of roles are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, they complement each other. Empathy provides a faster and more precise image of the inner life of others; change of perspective shows us sides of them to which empathy is blind. And thus the ability to project ourselves onto other people consists of both things together.
Know Thyself
If you want to put yourself in someone else’s role, you must first know what your own role is. We need an idea of ourselves in order to understand others. Just as the mirror neurons replay other peoples’ gestures and feelings in our own head, other brain systems reflect others’ beliefs and wishes. Parts of the so-called medial prefrontal cortex, right behind the forehead, are primarily responsible for this change in perspective.23
However, it is anything but assured that everyone knows what his or her own point of view is. Infants and most animals don’t even know who they are. Even in young children and the great apes, the frontal lobe is not nearly as developed as in adult Homo sapiens. Correspondingly, the former have at best a vague idea of themselves. That’s why it’s so fascinating to investigate the selfless actions of apes and very young humans. They provide information about how much self-awareness is necessary to be selfless. And if even little children are ready to do something for others spontaneously and without expectation of reward, it can hardly be because they have been taught to do so. It must mean that at least part of our essential being is naturally concerned for others.
Researchers usually use a mirror test to establish whether a human infant or an animal possesses self-awareness. They dab some color onto the subject’s forehead without it noticing, then place it in front of a mirror. If the child or the monkey reaches for his forehead in surprise, he knows that he is himself the figure in the mirror. Until they are about eighteen months old, human children behave as if they were seeing some other child.
But after that, they say their own name when they look in the mirror and try to rub the color off their forehead. And only children who react to their reflection that way are concerned about a playmate whose plastic spoon breaks or whose teddy bear is damaged. That was the conclusion reached by the Munich psychologist Doris Bischof-Köhler in a study of 126 girls and boys and their self-awareness and readiness to be helpful.24 All the children who helped each other had previously recognized themselves in the mirror, and all the children who did not recognize their own reflection were later unmoved or confused when a playmate suffered a small mishap.
The readiness of small children to help was also investigated by Felix Warneken and Michael Tomasello from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig.25 Their little subjects, all just eighteen months old, watched an adult drop a felt-tip marker on the floor and not be able to reach it, or they watched an adult with her hands full trying to open a closet door that was slightly ajar. The adult betrayed no emotion that might have infected the child. She simply stood there helpless in both situations. And almost always, the children left their toys and picked up the marker or opened the door for the adult. However, if they saw that the adult could take care of the situation by herself, they kept playing. They had obviously understood the problem the adult was having. A wish for reward seemed not to be involved. Quite the contrary: When the investigators began to reward the help with an interesting toy, the children soon became less helpful than others who had never received a reward. Apparently, children develop on their own an inclination to help others.
Chimpanzees also recognize themselves in the mirror and behave as if they could comprehend certain intentions of their fellow chimps. For example, they know which food caches another animal is aware of and thus can steal from and which are safe from their rival’s raids.26
Indeed, there are scattered reports of chimpanzees helping other species. One such comes from the Netherlands-born primatologist Frans de Waal.27 In an English zoo that had pygmy chimpanzees, or bonobos, a starling once flew into the glass side of their enclosure. A female bonobo named Kuni took charge of the fallen bird and set it on its feet again. She obviously understood the distress of this being so foreign to her, for when the bird did not take off, Kuni picked it up, climbed to the top of the highest tree, and unfolded its wings. Then she threw the starling into the air—which of course resulted in a crash landing. But Kuni was again ready to help. She jumped down from her tree, took up a post next to the poor bird, and protected it from her curious fellow chimps until it finally recovered and flew off.
When Warneken and Tomasello administered the same test they had given to young children to chimpanzees from the Leipzig zoo, their results were mixed. When an investigator dropped his marker, the chimps had no problem picking it up for him. But when he stood in front of the closet door with his hands full, they showed no interest.
Did they not want to help, or were they unable to? In follow-up experiments, the chimpanzees were quite willing to hand things to humans, even when they had to exert themselves to do so.28 Moreover, they gave fellow chimps access to food even when there was nothing in it for them. However, the difficulties the other was having had to be made very clearly discernible. A person with his hands full standing in front of a closet door was clearly too much of a challenge for the chimpanzees’ powers of deduction.
Thus a certain inclination to do things for strangers without expectation of reward seems to also be innate to our nearest relatives. And when they refuse to help, it’s not necessarily from selfishness but because they cannot comprehend the other’s distress. Helpfulness requires a high degree of intelligence.
The Nobel Prize for Empathy
The chemist and poet Roald Hoffmann opened my eyes to how much depends on understanding our fellow humans even in the “hard” sciences. He is among the most successful chemists in the world, a field where advancement is supposedly based only on intelligence and determination—and admittedly a bit of good luck as well. Hoffmann is the author of more than five hundred publications on the theory of chemical reactions. Universities all over the world have conferred upon him no fewer than thirty honorary doctorates, and last but not least, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1981, at the age of only forty-four. Moreover, he has written three plays and four critically acclaimed books of poetry.
When I met Hoffmann at his institute at Cornell University, I asked him what he attributed his successful career to. I expected him to say something about creativity and analytical ability. Hoffmann laughed and explained that Nobel laureates aren’t any smarter than other people. That was his experience, and he had attended innumerable conferences with prominent researchers. Curiosity was clearly indispensable, but many people were curious. The difference between him and many of his colleagues was only his talent for empathy. Thanks to it, he had accomplished much not only as a writer but also as a scientist. “I’ve always had a really good sense of what difficulties my colleagues in the lab are facing—even if they haven’t verbalized them. And I’ve then solved those particular problems.”29
Hoffmann traces his sensitivity to his childhood in German-occupied Poland, where he survived the Holocaust hiding with his family in the attic of a village school. (Sadly, his father was later shot by the Nazis.) It was impossible to thrash out conflicts in their hiding place. He learned not to cry, for the slightest sound could have given them away. The fear they suffered together during their years in hiding did not merely create a bond among them. It must also have taught Hoffmann, who was only seven when they were liberated, how to interpret the slightest signals from the others.
Of course, Hoffmann is being unduly modest about his analytical skills. But he’s right: Many people are intelligent. And his own explanation of his success seems quite plausible in light of the newest research into empathy. Whenever players in the trust game opt for cooperation that is beneficial for both players, the medial prefrontal cortex is activated—exactly the region of the frontal lobe that enables us to experience other people’s emotions.30 Empathy is obviously not just a lubricant for our relationships, but also the royal road to success.
The Empathetic Brain
Since we are used to seeing life as a struggle with others, we easily overlook how often there is nothing to be gained by competition. In such situations, unity is what counts. Just agreeing on a common course of action is often more important than which path we decide to take. When two colleagues are working on the same problem, they will find the solution sooner if they work together than if each one works alone.
The strategic task is not to gain the greatest possible advantage for yourself at the cost of your colleague, but to coordinate your efforts with her. When we think in that way, different processes are taking place in our brain, and thus different synapses are activated. The Taiwanese neuroeconomist Chen-Ying Huang investigated these differences systematically by scanning the brains of her subjects while they carried out tasks from the repertoire of game theory.31 Huang writes of two different systems in the brain that make strategic decisions. One depends on the dry processing of facts, the other on empathy.
If cooperation is at stake, rational consideration of our own benefit does not necessarily lead us to a useful conclusion. The brain provides us with a better alternative: By taking over the emotions of others, feeling our way into them, and intellectually adopting their point of view, we are much more likely to find a constructive solution.
Whenever the empathetic brain takes over, private intentions are replaced by a common goal—a goal that belongs completely neither to one party nor the other, but stands between them and binds them together. The border between “you” and “me” becomes porous. To a degree, our feelings and thoughts meld together. We see ourselves in the other and see the world through his eyes, but still retain our own point of view. The brain seems to be able to deal with this contradiction by allowing some but not all synapses to be “infected” by the other’s feelings and thoughts. And our own and the other’s perspective can shift back and forth, as in a reversible figure. In one moment our feelings meld with those of another; in the next we are ourselves again.