Hidden Brain - Episode 5: Compassion

Episode Date: October 20, 2015

On this week's episode of Hidden Brain, we'll explore the science of compassion, and how being kind to others can make a real difference in your own life.

Welcome to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. This week we're going to tell you the story of a woman who ran an interesting psychological experiment on herself. We look at the science of compassion and why being kind to others can make a big difference to your own life. It's easy to say, yeah, I can't make a difference, but everyone can make a difference. I want to tell you the story about a woman named Kelly Gillespie. She's in her early 40s, lives in London, and a couple of years ago, she took a psychology

class. The class was online, hosted by the education platform Coursera, and it was taught by Scott Plouse. He's a psychologist at Wesleyan University. And then my life changed after doing professor's thesis course. And now I'm studying to be a psychiatrist and counselor. Kelly learns several psychological concepts in the class. One is called the norm of reciprocity.

If you're nice to someone or you open up to them, they are likely to do the same with you. She also learned about the power of empathy. When you put yourself and someone else's shoes, it profoundly changes the relationship that you same with you. She also learned about the power of empathy. When you put yourself and someone else's shoes, it profoundly changes the relationship that you have with them. Now lots of people learn about ideas and psychology, but Kelly did something unusual. She took what she had learned in the class and she applied it in her own life. As well, I also like books and novels, so I spend a lot of time at the British Library at King's

Course. My husband works just on the corner from there. So every Friday afternoon, I would meet him out of work after I'd been at the British Library of the Researching. And I would finish about four o'clock. He would finish about six o'clock. I had a couple of hours to spend. Sometimes I'd go to the welcome, sometimes I'd just sit

and have a coffee and watch people walking by. And always the same young guy. And always smiling despite not having anywhere to live or not having a job or any money, but he was always so pleasant and it started off a simply me giving him what's their change I had. But it went on for a couple of months and I got to know him a little bit and know what had happened to make him leave home

and come to London. Kelly learned his name was Simon. She asked him if he would sit down with her for a cup of coffee. He was just walking past on the other side of the road. I think he walked up and down, taught them, got there a door, and on a night he would get onto the night buses because he had nowhere to sleep. He would just get on the night bus and travel down and down and down until six o'clock in the morning, hoping to sleep, hoping to not get attacked by the junks and the people that use the night buses in London. To make him feel comfortable, I told him a little bit about my life.

I told him I was waiting for a husband. I told him I was waiting for a husband I told him how long we'd been together, things like that. And I think by sharing a little bit of my life made him more confident to talk about his life. And I found out, I mean, he wasn't from far away from London, just in Kent on the southeast coast, so only, and now, with a away from London, way to go up. And what's going through your head about what you can say or do that would be helpful? He can't mention how much he missed his mum,

how much he was so close to his mum. And that's a relationship that should never be damaged or taken apart. So I think that led to me asking him would he like to speak to his mum because my mum died ten years ago and if someone said to me now you can speak to your mum I would bite their hand off so I just asked him if he wanted to speak to his mum and he said yeah he never had a problem with his mum it was because of his father that he left home and he loved his mum very much and I just thought if he loved someone

so much he shouldn't be so distant from them. He has nothing to lose. Can you remember your home phone number of course everyone remembers their home phone number? You have nothing to lose, because you have nothing. So, let's just give it a go and see what happens. He didn't want to at first, he didn't want to speak to her, but eventually I found his mum and he said, um, hemphand assignments. She started crying immediately,

because she hadn't heard from a woman for years. She didn't know whether he was alive or dead. And it was, if... Immediately, she was so emotional. And at that moment, I thought, okay, I'm just gonna pass the phone over and let them talk. They talked for about 10 minutes, 15 minutes. It was quite beautiful to watch because he started off not knowing what to say and being very guarded and defensive.

That all broke down within five minutes. He didn't tell them that he was homeless. He didn't mention that at all. He just had been living in London. Everything's okay. I'm still alive. He never mentioned his situation at all though. And once the conversation was over, what did you say to him and how do things go from there?

I got a little bit bossy actually and I said okay, this isn't going to solve itself. So we went to Victoria Coach Station and I said if you don't do do this this is the best chance you're going to have of going back home. Seeing your mum and bought a maticot on the next bus to go back to south end and that's the last I saw him, he got on the bus and the way he went. In terms of what you've done with Zinc Simon, has it changed your behavior? Have you always been somebody who goes up to homeless people and helps them? Or have you actually become more proactive because you sort of say I realized that I actually can make a difference and maybe I can make a difference on a mass

scale, but I certainly made a difference in one person's life and that teaches me that I could make difference in other people's lives too. Um, I think that doing the course with Professor Bliss most definitely opened my eyes to the reasons why people don't do something to help. I can remember he told us this wonderful story as part of the course, which was told originally by Kenyan and Vythermental activist called Wagarvi Mutamati. It's a story of a hummingbird in a forest that's been consumed by a wildfire and all the animals in the forest come out and they're transfixed as they watch the forest burning and they feel very overwhelmed and very powerless except this one little hummingbird that says

I'm going to do something about this fire. And the vet's police told us this story about all the animals laughing at this little hummingbird. Does it flew backwards and forwards from the nearer stream? With one drop of water that are timed to put out the fire. But at least it was doing something and it was doing the best it can. And I think that's something that the baby... The baby hit a tuna with me. But it's easy to say, I can't make a difference, but everyone can make a difference.

Coming up next, the person whom Kelly says changed her life, her teacher, psychologist Scott Plouse of Wesleyan University. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. I first met Scott many years ago. He's a very smart guy, but the thing that leaps out when you meet him is that he's a really nice guy. Actually scratch that. Nice doesn't cut it. Scott radiates kindness. The class where Scott connected with Kelly was an online class. Believe it or not, more

than 250,000 students from around the world signed up for the class. And at the end of it, Scott gave Kelly and his other students an assignment. It was called the day of compassion. Students had to spend one day being deliberately kind and generous toward others. Scott asked them to notice how these actions changed the way they felt about themselves. I asked Scott to tell me what students find when they do this. Students often report that it's transformative, that they're really surprised at the reaction, that people are so overwhelmingly report that it's transformative, that they're really surprised at the reaction, that people are so overwhelmingly positive that it starts to feed on itself. And by the end of the day, they report that this is a different side of me that I didn't recognize was there.

And is that because they are behaving differently, or other people are behaving differently? What's the cause? What's driving this change? Oftentimes it seems that compassion is contagious. We've talked about pain and forward, the idea that if you do something good for another person, that gives the other person a kind of lift, and then that person in turn will do something for somebody else, and it sets off a kind of chain reaction. So it's not just find the one dramatic thing that you can do in the day that can change the life of someone else.

You're actually asking people to change the way they live that day. That's right. And you know, Martin Luther King Jr. had a wonderful quote as well about the effect that you have, just in eating breakfast, the number of lives that you touch, where the cereal comes from, where the packaging comes from, who brought the cereal to you, where did the milk come from, and so on. And before you know it, you've touched thousands of lives without even realizing it.

So, the students are asked to look deeply, to think deeply about their life choices, their behaviors, and to think about it specifically in terms of compassion. So, when you're eating your cereal, even if you know that these thousands of people have touched your cereal, how do you act compassionately to what all of them? Well, in some cases you might be thinking about people who are working under unfair labor conditions. You might be thinking, if I throw away this food, what else am I throwing away? You might think about when you drive to

work, could you be bicycling, could you be walking, what consequences are there for other people? So there are many, many different connections that we normally don't have time to think about. And in this assignment, I ask students to simply slow down and think about those connections. You know, it's interesting when we actually start thinking about this in great detail, we often realize then that we are making choices that even though we think of ourselves as being good people, those choices are often unsupportable by the values that we claim to have.

You know, in my book, I talk about the idea that I was discussing the role that childhood vaccines play in saving children's lives in many parts of the world and how, you know, for $200, you could probably save a child's life in many parts of the world and how, you know, for $200, you could probably save a child's life in a poor country by making sure that she has access to just a suite of childhood vaccines. And when I gave my daughter a birthday party, this was a couple years ago, and the birthday party cost $200 or $250, I had a moment where I stopped and said, I'm spending $250 on my child's birthday party, and the same $250. I had a moment where I stopped and said, I'm spending $250 on my child's birthday party, and the same $250 could save the life of a child halfway around the world. Now,

how is it possible that one child's birthday party could be more important than another child's life? And I felt like a terrible human being. Well, I'm sorry you feel terrible about that, but at least having a level of awareness, I think, can be a positive thing. The Princeton philosopher, Peter Singer, has a great example of this. He talks about somebody who's walking past some water and sees a child drowning. And this person happens to be in very fancy clothes, let's say an armani suit or some very expensive shoes. And the question is, if you're the only one there and the only one capable of saving the child

and there's no time to spare, should you in fact ruin your suit? Should you ruin your shoes and save the life? Let's say that you would lose $200 doing that. And almost everybody would say, of course, the child's life is worth more than the $200. And then Peter Singer turns around and says, well, what if we could demonstrate that there's a child's

life halfway around the world and that $200 would be sufficient to save that life? Why aren't you spending the $200? And of course, the question is lots of us don't, the child and the pond who's drowning feels visceral to us and feels like our responsibility in ways that the child halfway around the world does not feel like our responsibility. That's exactly right. There's an immediacy there. There's a vividness and there's different consequences.

When you see somebody personally in need, rather than having somebody be abstract and remote and people will say to themselves, well, maybe that's true, but there are so many children in need. If I gave each one $200, I would be left in poverty. I can't possibly do that. And this is where psychology comes in. We tell ourselves stories about why it's okay not to help. Why it's okay not to help once. And we say, well, because if I then did once, I would have to do 100 and I couldn't possibly do that.

But in fact, sometimes you can do one, and one is better than zero. That's Social Psychologist Scott Plowes from Wesleyan University. When we return, we'll hear a poem from the writer Karen Ends, and we're going to issue a challenge of our own. I want to leave you today with a poem. It's by Canadian poet Karen Enz from her book Ordinary Hours. Karen came to write this poem after a moment when she experienced the

power of compassion, a small gesture from a stranger that lifted her heart. We asked her to read the poem and tell us about that moment. A goal will almost land. Go on. Everything is good. Up ahead a goal will almost land in front of you. Its wings will catch the current on a knife edge. Its flimsy element of bone will keep it motionless above the ground for just so long. And that pure pose will meet the light as if a god had ordered it to catch your eye. Go on. We are all defined by something like surrender, We are all defined by something like surrender, not a giving in exactly, not a yielding, but suspension. Perfect justice as the holding becomes opening as the moment of arrival on dry ground,

small and blazing with intent becomes departure. with intent becomes departure. I think that most of us at some point in our lives, in dark times maybe, are looking for some kind of message from something, someone, some place. And that's where the starting point of this poem comes about. I was walking down the street a few years ago and a bus stopped at the stoplight and there was an elderly man who looked out the window at me and he nodded and in that nod in that gesture there was a kind of urging on. And I kept that image with me and I think that's what drove the beginning of the poem at least anyway, was his very kind look toward me.

And I took that as a message. That was Karen Enns talking about her poem, a gal will almost land from the collection ordinary hours. What would you do if you had to spend one day beaming compassion into the world? It could be something small, acknowledging a stranger. It could be something big, changing the direction of another person's life. Please try it and tell us what you found. We'll put some of the stories you share with us on the podcast.

You can find us on Facebook at HiddenBrain or send us an email at hiddenbrainatnpr.org. This episode of the Hidden Brain Podcast was produced by Karam Agar Kalasan and Maggie Penman, special help from Jenna Weissberman, Megan Kane and Rachel Ward. I'm Shankar Vedanthan and this is NPR.