The Biological Basis of Compassion

The nature of compassion is connected with other persons.  We cannot be compassionate towards ourselves.  We cannot be compassionate apart from others.  Compassion is a personal, subjective experience that arises within our minds and emotions when we see or hear of another person’s suffering.  Compassion is our personal suffering, in some measure or form within us, directly connected with another person’s suffering.  As this essay will prove, it is human nature, it is our biological nature, to be compassionate persons.

Not all of us are equally compassionate by nature or development.  Some of us are very compassionate towards the suffering of others.  Some of us even are gifted with enormous capacities for compassion, and naturally sensitive to the suffering of others.  Yet, we must admit some of us have learned to stifle and suppress our natural inclination for compassion, and even great suffering fails to move some of us in emotion, reflection, or action to alleviate it.  This will be discussed in later essays.  For now, let us consider the roots of compassion in our human nature.  This is our common, natural, universal heritage, however it becomes stunted or deformed in later life–or can be relearned later as well.

Our Capacity to Feel for Others

Look at the picture to the left.  We could reproduce photos of mothers and babies from all over the world.  She is holding the baby close to her.  The baby feels its mother’s tender caress.  Within minutes of birth, healthy babies have an instinctual sucking reflex, to feed themselves at their mothers’ breasts.  In this picture, we see our natural, evolutionary, instinctual origins.  The mother instinctively loves, holds, feeds, cleans, and cares for her little baby she has carried for nine months within her.  The baby instinctively is comforted by the warmth of its mother’s body.  Its mouth takes warm milk from its mother’s breast, sating its hungry stomach.  Though the baby does not know at first the meaning of its mother’s gentle words, the baby knows these too are love.

This is our nature, this gentle, tender, physical and emotional interchange between the mother and baby.  Within only a few weeks, the baby becomes familiar with its mother’s voice and touch, and is comforted by them.  Separation from the mother, due to sickness, or premature duties of work,  instinctively creates anxiety and stress in the baby, and usually also the mother.  The natural bonds between mother and baby are deep in our genetic code and our experiential traditions.

The natural capacity to feel and experience love and care, that capacity’s natural growth in the weeks and months and years of early childhood, and even teen dependency, create our basic capacities to become healthy loving persons.  The more we are loved, the more our brains develop as normal human beings evolved to develop as interdependent members of our species.  Babies and children are so fragile.  They cannot survive on their own.  Our years of dependency makes us natural heirs of love–given by our parents to us, received by us in our very survival and growth.

When our baby stomachs hurt in hunger, we cried, in instinct.  When our mothers, or our fathers, or our grandparents, or some other adult caregiver, heard our cries, came with milk, and fed us, this was our first learning.  We learned the first reflex that later becomes compassion when we cried, someone who loved us came and fed us.  This primal experience began to nurture our capacity for compassion, for we experienced it.  We had a fundamental need to be fed.  We cried out.  Someone who loved us came and met our need.  Someone suffered with us, and acted to relieve our suffering.

Our Capacity for Compassion

Look at the picture to the right.  One child is feeding another.  Did the child read a book, or take a seminar, in compassion?  Not at all.  The child extending the food already knows what hunger is, to have the stomach growl, to see food, to want and need it.  So whether his playmate asked for the food or not, the boy on the right freely is giving it to him.  One child was hungry, or wanted food, and the other knew what it felt to want and need food, and gave it.

The essence of this simple act is compassion.  The child on the right has experienced the compassion of parents, who fed him when he was hungry.  When he extends food to his playmate, he is acting at this early age from his own experience of compassion learned from his parents.

Our Varying Capacities for Compassion

Is the child at the right in the photo above unique?  We have seen some young children who seem little apt to show compassion even when others have real needs.  In fact, some children even show pleasure holding back a candy bar as another child cries being taunted by it.  And yet, we also have seen children, some rather poor and underprivileged, whose little hearts willingly share what they have with others as soon as they know the need is there.  How is it that some children, privileged or poor, seem to have great or limited incapacities to feel compassion and respond to the needs of others?  This is connected to their emotional development, to a great extent, but not in every case.

The book title noted here is an important, accessible summary of how human love actually shapes and enlarges our neural networks in our brains from birth, and in critical months and years thereafter.  This should not be surprising.  Just as a baby’s bones and muscles grow and develop, its brain does as well.  Infants are born with instinctual neural networks intact in normal children, such as appropriate responses to touch, light, and smell, or the non-cognitive sucking response noted above.  Yet in those early weeks, months, and years, the baby’s brain grows with mushrooming new neural capacities only nascent at birth–voice recognition, speech and tonal patterns, language decoding and encoding, social mores and appropriate responses, etc.

Dr. Gerhardt, a British psychotherapist, treats not only these physical aspects, but their social significance.  Children who grow up with years of healthy, consistent, loving experiences become persons whose brains react and interact with others in ways they have learned.  Children deprived of such love, or whose parents give-then-withhold, or demonstrate what we call “emotional abuse,” do not develop healthy brains capable of responding in healthy ways.

From one point of view, this is nothing new, but common sense.  For thousands of years, most human beings understood from childhood experience, which became intuitive and instinctual, that by loving children well those little persons would become loving adults.

Now we surely know from anthropology how some human tribes, societies, and cultures–such as the Spartan Greeks, to cite an ancient example–intentionally interrupted the natural development of human love, replacing it with tribal or cultural values and behaviors.

We will not discuss the point here, but we must at least observe that many American values, cultural traditions and now, economic necessities, lead–or drive–many parents to interrupt their infants’ natural evolutionary requirements for normal neural-emotional development.

As Dr. Gerhardt observes in her book, the notable and rapid rise of adolescent and adult mental disorders, uses of psychotropic interventions, counseling and therapy, as well as self-help books promising happiness and coping, all are witnesses to the interruptions of normal brain development.

Some babies are born with prenatal conditions so their natural neural development has been retarded and slowed, for biological or genetic reasons, no “failure” on the part of the parents.  We understand if a baby is born weak or ill in the body, requiring more time to overcome those deficits (which sometimes are lifelong).  Yet our ignorance that some babies are born with strong neural capacities, and others with weak ones requiring more time to grow and recover at its own unique pace, is unrecognized.

We have in our society the “rule” that children begin public school around age five.  Is there any reader who remembers the terror of being forced to leave home, which was “safe,” to travel to school on a noisy bus (sometimes with abusive and violent children), to enter a building filled with “big people” and larger, older children, some who were scary?  Some children are emotionally ready, and manage the transition well.  Other children are traumatized by these early experiences, fear and hate school, and begin a failure chain, one year after another.

We are not suggesting that such an example necessarily impairs such a child’s capacity for compassion.  In fact, it is true some children learn to look forward to their hours in school because it is an ordered, respectful, positive environment, where they also are fed.  Some children learn compassion better at school because they have a tender and caring teacher, who really pays attention to them when sick, confused, or fearful.  There are some children whose parents are too self-absorbed, selfish, or who themselves are adult victims of poor parenting and early childhood experiences.  And these parents come from all social classes.  These matters are too complex, embedded with other factors unknown, so we may not generalize from such illustrations.

One thing is clear.  There is no substitute for the natural evolutionary process of love learned from emotionally healthy parents and other family caregivers, reinforced daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly.  And when a child’s natural need to love and be loved, to experience compassion, is met through other non-parental adults, then we must be grateful for those adults who understand their professional goal is not a paycheck, but to transmit the human experience of love and compassion to those in their care, “in the place of the parents” (in loco parentes).

Compassion:  Our Nature and Hope

We already have noted the depth and power of the brain’s evolutionary need for love, in order for compassion to grow by nature into its fullest capacities.  We have noted that psychopathologies can develop in children who have not experienced what their natures require.  Whether as children or adults, outside the home we have social, cultural, and even national influences and experiences that (1) run contrary to our inborn nature and needs and, with less frequency in our competitive culture, (2) support and nourish our nature and needs.

Once our brains have developed–in healthy, less healthy, or unhealthy ways regarding our capacities and experiences with compassion–are we determined to just “live with what we have and are” or, can we have new learning experiences to grow new capacities for compassion?  However strong our inner intra-psychic neural network is, we are not automatons determined by it.  Intuitively, by personal experience, and by the vicarious learning from history, we know adults can learn compassion, unlearn impairments against practicing it, and grow in these processes.

Dr. James R. Doty, MD, Director and Founder of Stanford University’s Project Compassion, The Center for Altruism and Compassion Research and Education (CCARE), researches, writes, and speaks about the healthy impacts of compassion on mental, emotional, and physical health.  Dr. Doty’s work on the human brain and its neurological operations–in regard to altruism and compassion–is very new.  However, the work of his entire research group is focused on one of the most fundamental aspects of human nature and being:  the biological force of love, loving others, being loved, and being healthy persons by reason of exercising our nature of love and caring.

I hope you will realize how your biological nature is designed so you are never going to be happy, healthy, and well-adjusted, unless you receive and give love.  You will become a better person.  You will become a better leader in every area of life.  People need and want to be loved.  They follow others who love them–even supervisors who treat them firmly, fairly, and consistently, with the clear evidence of a fundamental love for them as human beings.  Thank you, JDW