How to Pump Up Your Compassion

While compassion is not one of the required traits for most competitive sports, Geezer has observed that it can render some other venues more rewarding: the dining room, for example, and yes, the bedroom. Now, from researchers at the University of Wisconsin in Madison comes good news for the compassion deficient: compassion can be learned, maybe. The Scientific American reports that researchers working at the university’s Waisman Center for Brain Imaging took fMRI scans of the brains of 16 veteran meditators and 16 others who had started with no meditation experience but
received cursory training before they carried out a series of tests.
During these tests, the researchers measured the flow of blood in the brains
of both the veterans (some of them Tibetan monks) and the American
novices as the subjects did or did not meditate on compassionate
feelings while being subjected to various sounds with positive and
negative connotations.
Sciam reports that when engaged in compassionate meditation, the brain region known as the insula
burst into action when the expert meditators heard the sound of a woman
in distress. (The insula—a part of the limbic system—has been
associated with the visceral feeling of emotion, a key part of empathizing with another’s emotional state.) When these experts heard the female screams or the sound of a baby
laughing, their brains showed more activity than the novices in areas
like the right temporal-parietal juncture, which plays a role in
understanding another’s emotion. Read more about learning compassion in the Scientific American.