It’s well known among happiness researchers that people who do volunteer work and have an altruistic approach to life are happier than those who focus on themselves. This has been shown through statistical surveys and also through brain imaging.
Richard Davidson put Buddhist monk volunteers into an fMRI machine and got them listen to people’s cries of pain, whilst engaging in a compassion practice called loving kindness meditation. Results showed that the brain areas that activate during compassion meditation are the same parts that activate when happy.
This always puzzled me, because thinking about someone’s suffering doesn’t feel good at all. If someone close to us is suffering, we suffer too. Even the meaning of the word com-passion is ‘to suffer with.’
Things made more sense when I read about the work of Tania Singer, who did a similar experiment with a long-time meditator and got similar results during the loving kindness meditation. However, when she asked the subject to put himself in the sufferer’s shoes, his pain network lit up, and he begged her to stop the experiment, calling the feeling “unbearable.”
It turns out there are two separate brain areas involved. The mirror neurons that fire when we witness someone’s pain activate the anterior insula and the amygdala, which make it hard for us to bear to watch another person suffer. The parts of the brain involved in our giving impulse are the caudate nucleus and anterior cingulate cortex, the areas also associated with pleasure.
What this means in practice is that, by itself, ‘putting yourself in another’s shoes’ is not enough. It’s the urge to help, to give and to share kindness, together with the act of doing something about it, no matter how small, that uplift both giver and receiver.
Stephanie Hills ©