We like to move it

Virtual reality is often referred to as an “empathy machine,” a term coined in 2015 by tech entrepreneur and artist Chris Milk in a TED Talk. The idea is that while reading about something, or even watching a documentary, can be moving, there’s something uniquely intimate about virtual reality. It puts you “in” a situation in a way that other media doesn’t.

I’ve written before about how this idea has taken hold in service of social causes, and how “future tech” that’s really right around the corner could take empathy to a whole new level. Research is ongoing into what really happens when people put on VR headsets. Do they really feel more empathy for the characters they’re “watching,” or for people who experience the things they “experience” in VR? Some evidence shows that the answer is yes, but feedback about overwhelm and empathy fatigue after VR experiences is also common.

A couple of weeks ago Jeremy Bailenson, one of the foremost experts on VR, wrote in WIRED about some new evidence that the most effective way to create empathy through a VR experience is to make the user move around.

Bailenson, a professor of communication at Stanford, conducted a study in 2013 in which participants simulated being colorblind. Half used their imagination, while the other half used VR. They were then asked to lift up and sort objects in VR. The results showed that those who had experienced colorblindness in VR had a much harder time completing the task, and after the study, they spent a lot more time helping others when asked to do so.

The next study Bailenson plans to release will show a correlation between moving around a virtual coral reef and subjects’ desire to know more about ocean conservation.

He goes into a lot more detail in the piece, which you should read! This strategy of making people move around while having a VR experience might be the answer to a lot of criticisms of empathy focused VR. It makes sense to me just from a muscle-memory standpoint, but it will be interesting to see what the data shows about how VR, movement, and empathy are actually connected in our brains.

Empathy is both given & made

When the subject of empathy comes up, there’s often a debate about whether we’re born with it, or whether it’s something we learn. As with most things, the answer is probably not at either end of the spectrum  – it’s most likely in the middle.

In the past few months, I’ve been researching and writing about both ends.

For Woolly, I wrote about the empathy movement in podcasting, where a growing collection of shows aims to get people to listen to (and have) tough conversations. I wrote about my personal retreat into podcasts (and away from cable news and social media) after the 2016 presidential election, and how some of them – especially With Friends Like These – helped me find empathy where I didn’t expect it.

Then I wrote for Vitals, Lifehacker’s health vertical, about the newest development in the search for an empathy gene. Researchers have figured out that at least some of individuals’ differences in empathy can be explained by DNA, so we might inherit our empathy levels, and disorders characterized by low empathy, like schizophrenia, might have a genetic cause. But they’re still trying to find out how. This latest study didn’t come up with any major revelations, but it’s a step forward, and it also validated a lot of previous findings.

That’s all for now. Apologies for being so absent these past few months. I moved from New York back to North Carolina and have been settling in. Now that things are starting to feel normal, I’ll be back to blogging more regularly!

Poking the empathy part of the brain

Hello and Happy New Year! Hopefully by now you’ve settled into 2018 and dug out of the frozen tundra (if you’re in the U.S.) Here in Brooklyn we have reached the “grey slush and surprise ice patches” phase of winter and it’s gross as ever. I could really write a whole post about the disgusting things that happen to the sidewalks here when the snow melts, but I’ll spare you… Instead, let’s talk about something else that seems kind of obvious but is actually super interesting: empathy’s role in moral dilemmas like, you know, whether or not to kill someone.

In a recent UCLA study, researchers found that they could guess whether a person would harm or kill another person based on how their brains reacted when they saw someone else in pain.

The researchers showed 19 volunteers two videos in which a hand was either touched by a cotton swab or stabbed with a needle. This is a pretty common way to measure empathy, and that’s what these scientists did: they used an fMRI machine to measure brain activity in the places where this specific type of empathy – acknowledging someone else’s pain and feeling for them – is thought to reside. They also apparently analyzed researchers’ “mirror neurons,” which are neurons that are said to fire both when a person feels something and when they see someone else appearing to experience that same feeling. (There’s some controversy about mirror neurons.)

In addition to showing them the videos, the researchers asked the participants some common questions aimed at determining whether a person would hurt or kill someone else: there’s the “crying baby during wartime” question, for example, when you’re meant to say whether you would suffocate a baby whose cries might give away your location to the enemy. They also asked whether the volunteers would torture someone in order to prevent a bomb from killing some people, or harm research animals in order to cure AIDS.

The researchers guessed that those with more empathy related action happening in their brains during the needle video would be less likely to hurt the crying baby, and they turned out to be correct, at least with this small sample size. They didn’t find a correlation between brain activity and willingness to hurt someone else to help a larger number of people, however. The reason, they argued, may be that those decisions are a lot more complex.

“It would be fascinating to see if we can use brain stimulation to change complex moral decisions through impacting the amount of concern people experience for others’ pain,” said Marco Iacoboni, director of the Neuromodulation Lab at UCLA and one of the leading mirror neuron experts, in a statement. “It could provide a new method for increasing concern for others’ well-being.”

I highlighted just a few of the reasons this research does not suggest causation (and, as you hopefully know, research rarely does). But I’m actually more interested in Iacoboni’s quote. I’ve been researching and writing a lot over the past year about the different ways people are trying to increase empathy in the human brain. Most of the time, these stories involve tech like virtual reality or Fitbit-like gadgets. But Iacoboni’s suggestion of using brain stimulation to potentially make people more empathetic decision-makers doesn’t seem that far-fetched…though it does seem kind of like taking the easy way out. I’m sure he means this mostly (if not completely) for academic purposes, but I wouldn’t put it past tech companies to find a quick way to capitalize on “instant empathy.” We already have brain stimulation gadgets that are meant to help with stress and anxiety and a host of other things.

There are a couple of concerns, here. First is regulation to keep people from accidentally harming themselves or tech companies from doing nefarious things with the new level of personal brain data they might collect. Second is kind of the opposite: Do we want the government to potentially have the ability to stimulate our brains to change how we make complex moral decisions? I don’t mean to sound like a conspiracy theorist! But when so much sci fi stuff is becoming real life, it seems worth asking these questions.

Something to keep an eye on, for sure.

Empathy and neuroethics

Let’s talk about our future brains. And bodies, really.

Credit: Wyss Center

I’m talking about safeguarding ourselves as the line between human and machine starts to blur. I know it sounds like science fiction, but we won’t be able to say that much longer. Brain-computer interfaces are already being designed for use in everything from gaming to medicine, and there is novelty technology that already lets you move stuff with your mind. It’s actually pretty cool, but I would be lying if it didn’t also creep me out just a little bit. I’m excited about all of the new things we’ll be able to do with this technology, but every innovation has tradeoffs, and the biggest one is usually privacy. It’s weird enough that Facebook knows what I’ve been doing on other websites (and sometimes even seems to know what I’ve been talking about, out loud near my phone). Some of the medical interventions that use brain-computer interfaces go way deeper than that, and bring up a lot of ethical questions. (They also make me sort of wish I had Professor Snape around to teach me Occlumency…)

Thankfully, people who understand this a whole lot better than I do are researching how to make sure ethics evolve along with this kind of technology. And that’s where empathy ties into all of this. I often talk in this newsletter about how we experience empathy ourselves – how it works in our brains, and how different kinds of technology affect how we experience it. But I think we need to start paying more attention to whether the people creating the world around us – and the world of our future – are empathizing with us. Especially when it comes to medical technology. At the Wyss Center for Bio and Neuroengineering in Geneva, Switzerland, at least, this is on researchers’ minds. Professor John Donoghue, director of the center, recently published a report saying, in part, the following:

“Although we still don’t fully understand how the brain works, we are moving closer to being able to reliably decode certain brain signals. We shouldn’t be complacent about what this could mean for society.”

His biggest concern: “brainjacking.” Especially when it comes to semi-autonomous robots used to help restore movement or communication to people who have been paralyzed. Those kinds of machines don’t seem like the most obvious target for hackers, Donoghue admits, but what if the patient is a politician, for example? Donoghue and his colleagues called for new ethical guidelines for people working on semi-autonomous robots, especially in the medical field, which hopes to use them for all kinds of neurological therapies.

There’s also the issue of data privacy, just like we already contend with when we use things like Facebook, and even Fitbit. Except if you’re using a robot to help you regain memories of your life and family, the questions and data that robot has will likely be a lot more sensitive than your vacation photos and step counts. Donoghue recommends data encryption and network security guidelines like those already used in clinical studies.

Credit: Wyss Center

And what if a semi-autonomous robot that’s supposed to be helping you, ends up hurting you? Who’s at fault? These questions are still new (though we’ve been watching movies about them for years) but the time we have to figure it out may be shorter than we think.

“We don’t want to overstate the risks nor build false hope for those who could benefit from neurotechnology,” Donoghue said. “Our aim is to ensure that appropriate legislation keeps pace with this rapidly progressing field.”

I’ve spoken to a lot of people who feel like the same care was not taken when it came to the “rapidly progressing field” of internet communication, especially social media. How might things have been different if Twitter’s architects had thought harder about the harmful and dangerous ways people might use their tool, and what it might feel like to be on the receiving end of that harm and danger? Neuroprosthetics like so called brain training tools are obviously a lot more intimate than Twitter, but that means the same concept should apply even more strictly. At least we know the Swiss are working on it.

If you’d like to read Donoghue’s article on this topic: Help, hope, and hype: Ethical dimensions of neuroprosthetics, you can do so here.

Are we doing empathy wrong?

We tend to think of empathy as something we’re born with.

The truth is that the science on empathy is still relatively young. And while there is a general consensus that most of us are born with the ability to empathize, if we don’t start learning how to do it from a young age, we can run into problems. And it’s not as simple as learning to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. According to several recent pieces of research, there’s a “wrong” way to do empathy… or at least a way that can make things more difficult for ourselves and others.

A recent study from the University of Pennsylvania (in collaboration with SUNY Buffalo and Brown University) suggests that rather than actually imagining yourself in someone else’s position, it’s healthier for all parties to simply “reflect on the nature” of their suffering.

The study had 200 college-aged subjects read a story about a person who had money troubles after being in a car accident and was also struggling to care for a younger sibling after losing their mother. One group was asked to focus on how they would feel in that situation, while a second was asked to consider the perspective of the person who wrote the story but be as detached as possible.

The researchers found that the second group experienced the least stress. We’ve talked about this in this newsletter before – empathy can raise cortisol levels and blood pressure, which over the long term can be problematic. But when it comes to connecting with people on an everyday level, what’s wrong with feeling a little stress?

Well, maybe nothing, unless you’re a caregiver or a medical professional. In this study, the researchers’ takeaway was that doctors and nurses might want to put a little more distance between themselves and their patients.

“When we consider the situation with a little more distance, you’re feeling concern, compassion and a desire to help, but you don’t feel exactly what that other person is feeling,” one of the researchers told the Philly Voice. “Empathy is very important, and for a lot of caregivers probably is the reason they chose their field. We don’t have to teach our medical professionals to suppress that emotional response; we just have to try to help them have the right kind of response, thinking of others as opposed to thinking how they would feel in the same situation.”

The bigger takeaway for all of us, I think, is that at this point there are a couple of pretty well-established routes to empathy: direct perspective-taking, which can cause distress, and more distant compassion, which affects us less. But this raises the question: isn’t the point of empathy to be affected by what affects others? Will we be less likely to spring to action in response to someone else’s pain if we only employ the latter kind of empathy?

Personally, I struggle to avoid imagining myself in others’ shoes. Sometimes I get so overwhelmed by seeing or reading an account of something harrowing that I have a physical reaction (I’m probably a researcher’s dream!) So studies like this make me wonder about what might be going on with my own body, if it’s possible to change how I empathize…and if I’d actually want to!

On empathy and stress

Last week, I reached a stress peak.

I’ve always experienced a slightly higher-than-average level of anxiety, and after several weeks of disturbed sleep and steadily increasing work stress, I sort of lost it. Instead of spending the (finally) warm Brooklyn weekend outside, I spent most of it in bed, binge-watching Netflix and trying to recover from burnout. I even canceled my Easter plans to visit family. This week, I feel a lot better, and I’m beginning to analyze what went wrong in order to avoid repeating the same cycle in the future. So when this study about the connection between stress and empathy popped into my inbox, I was intrigued.

Stress is often described as part of our biological “fight or flight” response. When we get too stressed too often, our bodies can start to mistake relatively benign situations for potentially dangerous ones, and we can get stuck in “fight or flight” mode at inappropriate times and for long periods. There are a lot of other things at play as well – I don’t want to simplify stress! But for the purposes of understanding this research, let’s think about it that way. And then let’s shake up that thinking, because, according to Science Daily,

“NEWER FINDINGS REVEALED THAT HUMANS SHOW AN INCREASE IN PROSOCIAL BEHAVIOR UNDER STRESS.”

That’s prosocial, as opposed to antisocial, the latter of which is generally how one would describe fighting or fleeing. Claus Lamm and his team from the University of Vienna asked study participants to solve difficult tasks under a time limit while providing regular negative feedback (hello, stress) and measured their cortisol levels and brain activity. Then, they showed the participants photos of painful medical procedures and asked them to “vividly imagine” the pain of the patients in the photos. In some cases, they told the participants that the patients had received anesthesia. The researchers then also played the experimental economics “dictator game,” in which participants have to distribute a certain amount of money in whatever ratio they see fit (it’s used to test self-interest).

According to the fMRI results, the participants’ neural empathy networks reacted more strongly to the painful-looking images when they were under stress. The surprising thing was that this was true regardless of whether or not they believed the patient in the photos had received anesthesia. The same neural activation also reportedly correlated with the amount of money shared during the “dictator game.” The stronger the apparent empathy reaction in the game, the more money the participant shared.

“OUR RESULTS THUS SUPPORT THE HYPOTHESIS THAT HUMANS SHOW MORE EMPATHY AND ARE MORE PRONE TO HELPING OTHERS WHEN THEY ARE UNDER STRESS, BUT THAT THEIR PERSPECTIVE TAKING SKILLS MIGHT DETERIORATE,” SAID CLAUS LAMM.

Which is perhaps why, even though I felt myself getting more and more stressed out over the past few weeks, I kept saying yes to bids for my attention, work, and physical presence. It wasn’t until I had to leave a meeting to catch my breath and then cancel everything for a long weekend that I snapped out of this empathy-stress-empathy cycle.

Now that I’m on the other side of my stress crisis, I can see how I misread several situations during that time, and how internalizing those misread emotions so deeply could have caused further unnecessary damage to my already frayed nerves. Think about it – do you feel especially affected by others’ emotions and experiences when you are stressed yourself? When you’re at your wit’s end, do you feel like you empathize more with each person who asks you for something, or the main character in the show you’re binge-watching? Or are you more likely to shut down?

Of course, this is just one piece of research. But if Lamm had put me in an fMRI machine this time last week and asked me to look at photos of patients undergoing painful medical procedures, anesthesia or not, I certainly would have felt something!

How far (in time) can we stretch our empathy?

I have been doing a lot of research on empathy, and I’m starting to see its potential application almost everywhere I look. I read an article about the future of Virtual Reality entertainment, and it left me wondering how VR might affect – or maybe in some ways encourage – empathy. I read about how so many women experience postpartum injuries that go undiagnosed or ignored, and I wondered how better empathy training in the medical field might help prevent that. Then today, I read this piece about the paralyzing effects of climate anxiety, and I found myself wondering, can empathy be extended to those who aren’t yet born, and to experiences we can’t currently fathom?

According to Roman Krznaric, an adviser to Oxfam and the UN who has written a book about empathy, “empathy is not just a psychological phenomenon but also a political tool.” At least, if your politics depend on breaking down a “we/them” barrier and not building one. And, let’s face it, the issue of climate change is definitely a political one. When the Democratic nominee for president feels the need to say, during her acceptance speech, that she “believes in science,” there’s really no denying that science is political.

But believing in science is one thing. Adding empathy to the equation is another, and some suggest it may be the only way to actually enact change based on said science.

In the piece linked above, Krznaric begins with a story about a woman dealing with the impact of massive flooding in Britain in 2007. She was able to empathize quite easily with people whose homes were at risk from rising sea levels due to climate change. But she’s just one person. Krznaric focuses on why it’s so difficult for governments to enact policies that will protect future people from climate change, but I find myself thinking even more at the granular level. Our political systems are very short-term-oriented, as Krznaric explains, but are individuals? Dutch social psychologist Geert Hofstede seems to suggest that the answer depends on culture. Which brings me to the question: is this issue of climate change anxiety and climate change empathy really a U.S. problem?

Let’s say, for the moment, that that is the case. That people and politicians in the U.S. have a harder time empathizing with future generations than folks from other cultures. (This seems to be a pretty well-accepted idea, at least in the business world.) A major tenet of U.S. society is equality. In that case, as Krznaric argues: “if we believe all human beings are equal, we cannot morally justify deciding not to act today because future generations should be expected to pay more of the costs of climate change.”

But we do. We justify it all the time. Either because we won’t be around, or we don’t have any children or grandchildren who will be around, or we know our children or grandchildren will have the means to manage with whatever climate disaster befalls their world. Some see this as a moral issue, others a philosophical one. I’m not sure what the answer is, myself. Krznaric suggests that it is imagination: “We must become experts at imagining ourselves into the lives and thoughts of our great-grandchildren, and of strangers in distant times.” But who has time for that?

 

If any readers have suggestions for further research on empathy – either specific to this post or more generally – please send them my way! kugolik at gmail dot com.

To Veg or Not to Veg, Pt. 2

It’s been a while since I’ve talked about how the media covers science, but this brouhaha over whether or not a vegetarian diet can kill you seems like too good of an opportunity to miss. (This is titled Part 2 because I wrote about some studies on vegetarianism on this blog exactly two years ago today. Whoa.)

Last week, the New York Post and others reported that a Cornell University study showed that long-term vegetarianism can lead to a genetic mutation that makes people more likely to develop colon cancer and heart disease.

The problem? The study didn’t say that.

On Friday, Vice published this takedown of the coverage of the study, talking to the actual researchers who conducted it. What a novel idea! The researchers did, in fact, find that long-term vegetarians have a gene variant – not a mutation caused by vegetarianism, but a variant that may have evolved in the genes of vegetarian cultures, such as that of India. This variant means these people produce synthetic versions of different fatty acids. An overabundance of fatty acids = inflammation, according to these researchers, so, in fact, people with this genetic variance are better off sticking with a vegetarian diet. If they don’t, they could overload on omega-3s and omega-6s and suffer from inflammation and, potentially, disease. This is complicated, so it’s easy to see why many publications looking for a headline didn’t quite understand it.

What does it actually mean in practice? It seems to be more anthropological than medical. “Our claim is that, to put it simply: you need to have a diet that is matched to your genes,” one of the researchers told Vice.

As I learned when reporting this big feature last year, genetics is a very complex field of study. It is easy to get wrong. I actually made a mistake in the initial version of my story because I was confused about the way a specific gene therapy worked. I fixed the mistake, and I didn’t write a sensational headline about it, but what I’m saying is that I understand. This stuff is tough. It’s so important though, and we have to do better.

The Vice story came to another persuasive conclusion as to why so many publications got this wrong: they don’t like vegetarians. As a person who was a vegetarian for more than three years, I have to say I can believe it!

Wedding Wednesday: Is marriage good for your health?

Now that we’re less than six months away from the big day, I thought I’d allow myself a few more wedding-related posts. No, this is still not a “wedding blog” (take note, people who google me and read my blog before I interview you!) but I’ve come across some interesting things while planning this shindig that I think are worth sharing here. Today: marriage and health.

Set aside the obvious stress of interpersonal relationships (and planning a ceremony and reception for 100+ people to celebrate them…) and it turns out that getting married is actually pretty good for you.

There’s the oxytocin release of falling in love, of course, but some research shows that partnering up with someone who makes you happy could actually help you live longer. That’s probably not news to you, but a new study from the Journal of the American Medical Association suggests that being married correlates with better outcomes from surgery.

From a release from JAMA Surgery:

Chances of survival after major surgery may be better among married vs unmarried persons, but little is known regarding the association between marital status and postoperative function. Characterizing the association between marital status and postoperative function may be useful for counseling patients and identifying at-risk groups that may benefit from targeted interventions aimed at improving functional recovery.

This is an important caveat about correlation vs. causation, which is nice and refreshing to see after this week’s drama about meat and cancer… which I might address in another post. But I found it really interesting that even though they aren’t entirely sure what led to this correlation, it could be useful for recovery purposes.

Mark D. Neuman and Rachel M. Werner of the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania used data from the University of Michigan Health and Retirement Study to find this marriage connection. Participants in the University of Michigan study reported that they had undergone cardiac surgery, and some died after such surgery, which was reported by proxies, according to JAMA. At the post-surgery interview, 19 percent of married participants had either died or had worse health, compared to 29 percent of divorced or separated people, 34 percent of widowed participants and 20 percent of participants who had never been married.

Participants who were divorced, separated, or widowed had an approximately 40 percent greater odds of dying or developing a new functional disability during the first 2 years after cardiac surgery compared with the married participants.

“These findings extend prior work suggesting postoperative survival advantages for married people and may relate to the role of social supports in influencing patients’ choices of hospitals and their self-care,” the authors said, adding as usual that more research is needed. You can see the study here.

Of course I hope neither my fiance nor I have to have heart surgery at any point, but heart issues run in both of our families, so it’s good to know that if and when it happens, we might have a slightly better chance of recovery! As always, it’ll be interesting to watch what comes out of further research.

Memory, anxiety and the “full brain”

I often wonder if my brain can get “too full.” Not permanently — no, even I am not narcissistic enough to believe I could ever know that much — but temporarily. I worry that all of the little bits of information coming at me (and all of us) all the time might have some larger affect on my ability to remember more valuable things. Are Facebook statuses and Tweets and pop-up ads cluttering up precious space that I need for financial articles and interviews?

Wired had a great piece this afternoon answering this very question, and leading me to ask some more of my own.

It turns out that yes, you can clutter yourself up too much sometimes, but it’s unlikely for your brain to ever reach its max. Some people even have issues forgetting, which can be really problematic for various reasons. Take a look at the piece – there are some links to research and some really interesting points about how memory works and about the true difference between short- and long-term memory.

This piece also left me wondering about some things about my own brain. I personally have a lot of trouble with long-term memory. I don’t remember much from more than a few years ago. I remember bits and pieces — scenes, smells, places, people — but I can almost never recall full events. Maybe there’s a particular name for this, I’m not sure. And maybe no one can truly remember much more than me — there’s a lot of evidence that many of our memories are basically filler (see links in above-linked piece). But it’s always bothered me that while I know intellectually that they happened, I can’t actually remember a lot of my “firsts” or happenings that other people in my life deem important. Sometimes this is OK, like when my fiancé remembers a fight from five years ago that I thankfully do not, but sometimes it’s a little sad. No, I don’t remember going on that trip with my family, or what it felt like the first time I rode a bike, or what I got for my 17th birthday.

I know that people can sometimes “block things out” after a traumatic experience, but nothing in four years of therapy has suggested that I had such an experience. I did, however, grow up with a lot of anxiety. (Outing myself here – and not for the first time on this blog – that’s why I’m in therapy!) The more I read about how memory works, the more I wonder if that has something to do with my limited recall ability. Maybe something to do with “working” memory?

From the Wired piece:

Juggling more than just a few pieces of information in your head at once is really hard. Throw one item too many into the mix and you’ve forgotten the name of the person you were just introduced to, or lost the idea you had before you got that phone call.

If that’s true, and if working memory is the foundation of long-term memory (my reading suggests that this may be true?) it seems like it wouldn’t be a far stretch to suggest that a child or teenager who is constantly thinking or worrying about something else in the back of her mind might have a tough time building long-term memories. I’m looking forward to reading more about it; let me know if you have suggestions!