Tania Singer

We can become affected before we've understood much about the situation.

Researchers Tanya Singer and Klaus Lam distinguish this from empathy.

That includes awareness of the difference between self and other.

Feeling something in response to you still leaves two people having an experience.

These processes can work together, but separating them helps us ask more precise questions.

Researchers Tania Singer and Olga Klimeki also distinguish sharing someone's feeling from compassion, which includes concern and motivation to help.

You can want to support someone without reproducing their suffering inside yourself.

And then our fourth distinction is conduct.

I don't know exactly.

Well, I think I was I've learned a lot about and read a lot of Tanya Singer's work.

I don't know if you've come across.

She's a social

Women, on average, are more agreeable and more empathetic than men are.

There was this really interesting study done in 2006 led by Dr. Tanya Singer at the University College London and published in the Journal of Nature.

It looks at how men and women process punishment of a game cheater differently in their brain.

Researchers monitored the brain activity of 16 men and 16 women using an fMRI scanner.

And I didn't really know how to square all those things up.

Compassion fatigue, is it a problem? Or compassion, is it a good thing? So as we started thinking about how to teach emotional intelligence, I dug into this and And particularly the research led by somebody named Tanya Singer and her colleagues.

And I'm going to talk a little bit about this.

Think of empathy as feeling with empathy.

Compassion, in contrast, is feeling for compassion.

It is about caring, but it is not about feeling the same things that the other person is feeling.

So what's going on with that? What Tanya Singer and colleagues found was that empathy is the detection system.

If you can't feel with, you don't know what to express compassion for.

So I had that going, and then we had the beginnings of a pilot at LinkedIn, and we were just about to consider one at Google, and COVID happened.

So we had to shut the whole thing down, at which point I was invited to join a startup that involved a woman named Dr. Tanya Singer, who's a renowned German neuroscientist who's done work on understanding where empathy and compassion exist in the network areas of the brain.

They're different things.

They exist in different places.

And that's why we call it Compassion 2.0. And, you know, Compassion 1.0, in my own studies over 35 or so years of looking at various philosophical and spiritual systems, compassion is a through line through every single one of them.

And oftentimes compassion is thought of as a virtue that is taught in a non-secular framework, often by a spiritual teacher, to be brought to all aspects of your life, which, of course, is a beautiful thing.

The reason why we call it 2.0 is that pioneering neuroscientists, such as Dr. Tanya Singer, who I mentioned, or Richie Davidson, or many, many others now, have been using MRI machines and other scientific methods to identify and teach compassion in a secular way that comes from a validated basis.

Now, the validation is arbitrary.

Now I added GABA and that inhibitory neurochemical starts calming everything down and my brain will not light on fire.

So this leans into the research of Tanya Singer out of Germany.

She found out that actually compassion, people didn't get fatigued at it at all.

It was only when they were in empathy.

And I will say that in my training, I was not taught that much about the distinctions either.

I think recent neuroscience over the last decade and a half, primarily led by Tanya Singer and Olga Klovecky, has just illuminated so much about these distinctions.

And I've been really excited about taking that back to the people and helping clinicians and caregivers understand how to bring this to life for them.

So empathy is really about sharing in another person's emotional experience.