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SPEAKER_00 Hey there and welcome to Life Noggin.
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SPEAKER_00 You're watching a friend hang a picture on the wall of your house.
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SPEAKER_00 She swings the hammer, her hand slips, and she smashes her thumb.
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SPEAKER_00 You rush to her side to make sure she's okay, not just because you don't
want her to sue you, but because she's your friend and a fellow human.
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SPEAKER_00 You can imagine what she's going through.
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SPEAKER_00 What's happening in your brain is a complex process that we've evolved
to help us survive as species.
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SPEAKER_00 It's called empathy, and it's the capacity to understand or feel what
another person is experiencing.
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SPEAKER_00 It's different from sympathy in that you're putting yourself in
someone else's place and understanding what they're going through,
not just feeling sorry for them.
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SPEAKER_00 While empathy can be seen in other species, dogs and primates come to
mind, it's actually rare in the animal kingdom.
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SPEAKER_00 So how did you lucky humans develop it?
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SPEAKER_00 Well, humans gained empathy in three steps.
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SPEAKER_00 First, humans began pair-bonding with our mates as a way of raising our
young.
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SPEAKER_00 The need to cooperate with another person to keep babies alive
encouraged our brains to grow.
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SPEAKER_00 Second, humans started living in communities.
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SPEAKER_00 Having to regularly deal with other people made us smarter.
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SPEAKER_00 If you've ever had roommates who refused to pick up after themselves on
occasion, then you know how important it is to be alive together in
peace.
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SPEAKER_00 and throw out the garbage once in a while.
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SPEAKER_00 Third, human tribes had to cooperate to survive in harsh environments,
where food was really scarce.
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SPEAKER_00 Here, we learn the importance of putting the good of all over our own
desires.
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SPEAKER_00 Essentially, relationships are the core of why we evolve the way we did.
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SPEAKER_00 Everybody reach out and hug somebody.
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SPEAKER_00 I mean, someone you know, if they're cool with it.
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SPEAKER_00 Don't hug strangers.
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SPEAKER_00 And that's amazing!
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SPEAKER_00 Human beings are still naturally self-centered, however.
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SPEAKER_00 We project our life experiences and emotional states onto others.
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SPEAKER_00 To compensate for that, another part of our brain, the right
supramarginal gyrus, separates our emotions from those we see in
others.
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SPEAKER_00 It keeps us from going full Johnny Bravo on people, and helps us
understand what they're going through, even if it's different from our
own experience.
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SPEAKER_00 Knowing this about human development, it seems obvious that empathy is
part of our nature and not just something we learn.
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SPEAKER_00 But that's not the whole story.
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SPEAKER_00 We're born with the basics of empathy, but it takes work to make us
empathy pros.
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SPEAKER_00 See, children need to be empathized with in order to fully experience
empathy themselves.
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SPEAKER_00 If your caretakers empathize with you, you're more likely to be an
empathetic person.
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SPEAKER_00 On the other hand, you can be taught not to empathize, or to be born with a
disconnect in the empathetic centers of the brain.
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SPEAKER_00 Some researchers believe that those who lack empathy due to, say, a
difficult childhood, suffer from sociopathy, and those who are born
with the inability to empathize suffer from psychopathy.
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SPEAKER_00 Words like sociopath and psychopath get thrown around casually, so
it's important to know that these are real conditions that people deal
with, even if it's only a small percentage of the population.
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SPEAKER_00 Are you an empathetic person?
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SPEAKER_00 What other mental processes that we take for granted do you want to see us
cover?
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SPEAKER_00 As always, I'm Blocko and this has been Life Noggin.
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SPEAKER_00 Don't forget to keep on thinking!