One evening Miguel is preparing dinner in the kitchen. Next to him, on a highchair, is his six-month-old daughter Irene, who plays with a rattle. He cuts the greens and thinks about work when the girl's whimpers bring him back to reality. Irene tries to grab a bottle of water on the table. Miguel gives her a bottle, and, having calmed down, the girl looks at him.
Something similar happens over 12 thousand kilometers in one of the Tokyo laboratories, but now two humanoid robots act as father and daughter. They sit opposite each other, at a certain moment one of them reaches out and slowly moves his hand, as if he wants to take something. The robot sitting opposite is looking at him, and his electronic brain is trying to decipher what is happening.
Luc Steels gazes at his computer screen and exclaims: “It is truly amazing what a person can become. We interact and understand each other without even speaking!
In fact, we express very little through language communication, most of the information comes from the context, as well as from our ability to predict what others should want. If a father gives a bottle with a nipple to a child, then he does it because he was able to assess the situation and understand the need for it. And this is just one example of what we are trying to understand when we use these robots."
Stills is one of the world's leading artificial brain experts, creator of the popular Sony robot dog Aibo and from his office at the Institute for Evolutionary Biology at the Graduate Center for Scientific Research (CSIC) and University. Pompeu Fabra (UPF) in Barcelona is collaborating with other scientific centers around the world to endow artificial brains with machines that can one day actually coexist with humans.
“We want robots to learn to understand us,” he says. Catching the perplexed look of the listener, he explains that the meaning of the word "mutual understanding" is much broader than we are used to thinking, since it also includes such concepts as "compassion", "sympathy", "empathy".
“When we see someone in tears or we are told that a friend's mother is seriously ill, we put ourselves in the place of this person and worry about him precisely because of a feeling of compassion. It is very similar to how a little girl unsuccessfully tries to take something, and her father comes to her aid. In principle, these processes are associated with memory, with the ability to understand what the other wants and foresee what will happen,”he explains.
Promotional video:
Together with his research team, Stills uses robots as a model for understanding this empathy. Because, he believes, one day they will have to interact on a brain level with people, for example, during rescue operations in natural disasters. “Imagine how useful they would be in Fukushima or when lifting a sunken South Korean ferry. But, unfortunately, they are not yet ready for this,”notes Stills.
Change behavior
Luke Stills is one of the many scientists around the world researching compassion, the instinctive feeling of people who care about other people's pain. To this end, he uses robots, while others look at this phenomenon from the point of view of genetics, biology, social and cognitive psychology. And everyone is trying to better understand this dimension, which, they emphasize, is perhaps one of the main characteristics of people.
Through compassion, people are able to understand each other's thoughts, enter into relationships and coexist. Of course, without this quality we would not have survived, would have died out long ago. Or they would never have left Africa. Despite this purely human property, for a long time it was outside the sphere of interest of neuroscience. Partly because it was considered a secondary issue, and also because they did not know how to explore the quality that was born out of relationships between people.
Thus, during the entire first half of the 20th century, researchers limited themselves to observing what happens in the human brain when he thinks and feels, without wondering how he perceived the experience of others. The so-called "emotional revolution" of the early 21st century made up for this deficiency. And to such an extent that there is now a boom in research in this area.
“Relatively recently, a conclusion was made about the irrational nature of man. Many books and articles by famous authors have appeared, which talked about the importance of the emotional component of consciousness. And now interest in emotions has increased, especially in those related to the moral sphere and behavior. This is in no small part why hundreds of empathy research studies have been published over the past decades,”explains Arcadi Navarro, an evolutionary biology researcher and head of the Experimental and Health Sciences Department at the University. Pompeu Fabra.
“This is due to the fact that we are living in a period of economic and value crisis,” said Claudia Wassmann, a German neuroscientist at the Institute. Max Planck. Now, with a Marie Curie Fellowship, she is doing research at the University of Navarre.
Many scholars exploring the mysteries of empathy are not purely theoretical. They argue that when it is possible to understand the mechanism of this phenomenon, it will be possible to encourage people to be more compassionate and, possibly, reduce manifestations of selfishness. According to the famous American sociologist and economist Jeremy Rifkin, author of the book "The Civilization of Compassion", this quality has become the main factor of human progress and should continue to be so. “We must show greater compassion for each other if we want the human to continue to exist,” the scientist is convinced.
From mirror neurons to oxytocin
The first question that arises could be formulated as follows: is there a certain predisposition to compassion in human biology, just as it happens with language? After all, strictly speaking, we are all inclined to some degree of compassion. Many scientists have tried to answer this question.
In the 90s in Parma, Italy, a group of researchers studied the brain of a macaque when they discovered what meant a significant breakthrough in neuroscience. Many then believed that this was the key to solving the mystery of the origin of compassion. Scientists noticed that one nerve cell in the primate's brain was activated when the animal grabbed an object as it observed in others. It looks like the monkey's brain was repeating the movements it saw. Hence the name of this cell was born: "mirror neuron".
“The key to understanding compassion is open!” Says Christian Keysers, researcher at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience and author of 'The Empathic Brain'.
“Obviously, these neurons are central to understanding how we read other people's thoughts and take on their feelings. This can explain many of the mysteries of human behavior. Mirror neurons connect us to other people, and the malfunctioning of these cells creates an emotional barrier between us and other people, like autistic people,”explains this science enthusiast, convinced that we all have compassion inherent in nature.
At the same time, according to many neuroscientists, the issue is not limited to mirror neurons. Indeed, they are activated when a person sees another crying, while autists (they have this mechanism is poorly developed) have little inclination to compassion. So, are these neurons triggering the capacity for compassion?
Not at all. They will not at all make us empathize with others. If this were indeed the case, then there would be no differences in the behavior of people, some of whom always experience compassion, while others experience it very little or not at all. It's a cultural issue. When we are born, we learn compassion,”says Claudia Wassman.
And if it's all about hormones? she continues. Could oxytocin, known as the love hormone that plays a key role in building relationships between people, may influence compassion?
Neuroscientist Òscar Vilarroya at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) is studying whether couples' compassion for crying children changes before, during and after pregnancy. And what role does oxytocin play in this.
What will geneticists say? Numerous laboratories rushed to search for the "compassion gene". “Everything that can be measured lends itself to scientific methods,” says Arkady Navarro. - But how to measure compassion? If you put a sick animal in front of a person and ask him to caress him, is that compassion? We do not have an indisputable method for measuring this human quality. And until we solve this issue, it makes no sense to turn to genetics."
Are we born with compassion?
Is there something in our biological makeup that makes us feel compassionate at birth, or, as others have argued, is it developed through cultural development?
“We have to be ready for this from the start, because a banana will never gain feelings of compassion, while we can,” says Arkady Navarro. “But this does not mean that we are born with a sense of compassion.” Indeed, he adds, people have certain qualities that in varying degrees give them a sense of compassion. The researcher is not very interested in whether we acquire them from birth, or whether they need to be educated in ourselves. “We are characterized,” he recalls, “by a clearly expressed parallel evolution along the lines of nature and culture, genes and habitat. We are programmed to learn many things [for example, language]. Perhaps that is why children are less compassionate than adults."
Elephants and a dead baby elephant
Some animals also seem to exhibit certain signs of compassion. Jean Decety, a researcher at the University of Chicago and one of the leading experts in the field of morality, compassion and prosocial behavior, set up the following experiment: he placed a rat in a plastic tube so that other rodents could see it. And they tried to save her, although there was chocolate nearby, which they are crazy about. Did they feel compassion too?
In a sense, yes, Wassman says, adding that compassion needs to be subdivided into several mechanisms. The main one is activated when the child begins to cry because he sees the other in tears. There are more complex mechanisms, for example, identifying yourself with another person. Or one that allows you to understand the situation in which the other person is. The first mechanisms are present in both humans and animals. The third belongs exclusively to man. “To develop compassion, you need to have a social brain, which is unique to humans,” says Wassman.
One of the most authoritative neuroscientific theories says that the social brain that Wassman speaks about was formed about 3.5 million years ago, when the first people came out of the forest and they needed a more complex mind that would allow them to think about others, about those who with whom they lived together. That is, compassion was necessary in order to survive.
“There is a hypothesis using a biblical comparison and asserting that we received the brain as a result of expulsion from paradise,” says Oscar Villanova, founder of the Department of Social Brain at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. At a certain moment, our ancestors found themselves on the border of the jungle and the tropical steppe, and in this position, confidence in the rest of the team members was extremely important in order to survive, since dangers lurked everywhere. “It was fundamental to understand the behavior of another person, and involvement allowed us to create a very powerful mechanism of social thinking to understand what was happening around and act in their own interests or in the interests of your environment,” says the neuroscientist.
Better world
What if humanity could be taught to show more compassion? “We would be doing much better,” Wassman jokes, adding that in Germany children are taught this quality already from kindergarten. This is also the practice in those schools in Spain that provide emotional education. Another researcher from Germany, Tanya Singer, is convinced that you can not only educate, but also develop compassion in society. Not afraid to sound naive, she declares that this way you can build a better world.
Singer works at the Max Planck Institute for Cognitive Neurosciences in Leipzig, Germany and is considered one of the leading researchers in social brain and compassion. In 2004, while at University College London, she published in Science the results of a study conducted on human couples to analyze the reaction of a person who sees the suffering of a loved one. The participants in the experiment were seated opposite each other, and while one of them received a light electrical discharge in the hand, the brain of the second was scanned.
The scientist saw how various parts of the brain associated with pain and sensations are activated. To her surprise, she noticed that some of the sites are also activating, which makes you cry out "Ay!" When this happens to us. “This is where compassion begins,” Singer is convinced. She is now exploring the phenomenon of empathy, which is often considered synonymous with compassion, but it is still somewhat broader. To this end, she scanned the brain of a Buddhist monk whom she asked to focus on compassion. To her surprise, she found that the brain regions associated with romantic love and gratitude were activated in this case.
Singer repeated the experiment, but this time asked the monk to focus on something more specific, and he began to think about the children of one of the orphanages in Romania, whom he had seen in a television documentary. Then the same areas in his brain that were mentioned in previous studies on the topic of compassion were activated.
If you understand what is happening, then you can strengthen it, the researcher is sure. She also uses video games, during which she puts a group of volunteers in a situation where they must show compassion, while she herself watches the processes taking place in their brains. So far, she has been able to establish that two rather different areas are activated: either the feeling associated with dopamine, or the areas responsible for the feeling of gratitude. Or the so-called "affiliate network", which turns on when a person sees a photo of his son or other half. This is where oxytocin and some opiates come into play.
Singer, who spoke about a protective economy based not on competition but on cooperation and empathy at the last Davos World Economic Forum, is now exploring whether meditation can be used to develop compassion and empathy in people. If we manage to understand this human property and educate it in ourselves, Singer believes, then we will surely build a better society.
Cristina Sáez "La Vanguardia", Spain