Neuroscientist Tania Singer and her team recruited volunteers to play a game. Some were asked to play by the rules. Others were instructed to ignore them. To not play fair.

After all participants played the game together, they were then asked to observe each other in a second activity. Scientists measured some of the volunteers’ brain activity as they observed some of their former game opponents apparently being subjected to different levels of pain.

Result?

The brain areas that signal pain became active in all who thought they were observing pain in others. This provides neural evidence of their empathy.

Yet, when those who’d played “unfairly” in the earlier game appeared to be in pain, male volunteers who observed them showed significantly less empathetic brain activity than when they saw fair-players in apparent pain. In fact men felt more desire for revenge.

For women the response was different. They showed the brain responses of empathy regardless of how they felt about the participants’ moral behavior. Earlier research supports this finding.
Regrettably, I feel I’d respond more like a man in this experiment.

Learn more about how our brain affects our behavior in Donald Pfaff’s book, The Neuroscience of Fair Play. Relatedly read On Being Certain and Predictably Irrational.

Here’s the good news. Men and women can use meditation to change our instinctively negative reactions – even in the face of unfair or otherwise negative behavior. Monitoring the brains of Tibetan monks at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, neuroscience professor Richard Davidson found that the monk’ first instinct was compassion rather than anger.

Here’s the bad news, at least for many of us.

To become that compassionate, monks spent at least 10,000 hours in meditation. Learn more about the power of compassion in Emotional Awareness, a book by the foremost expert on reading faces and on lying, Paul Ekman.

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“My life is the complete opposite of everything that I want it to be.”

Jerry says, “Since all of your instincts are wrong, then the opposite must be right.”

George immediately realizes that this is a great idea. So, instead of ordering his usual lunch, he orders something totally different. Suddenly a beautiful woman turns to look at him. Now, instead of relying on his usual unsuccessful pick-up technique of pretending to more wealthy or more sophisticated than he is, George simply says:

“Hi. I’m unemployed and I live with my parents.”

She looks at him with a big smile, and answers in a sultry voice. “Hello.”

Later, George takes the woman to a movie. Sitting behind them are two tough looking men who are speaking loudly and kicking their seats. Instead of his normal reaction of shrinking in fear, George stands up and tells them to shut up. Stunned by this direct response, the men cower. Later, George has a chance interview with George Steinbrenner. Instead of trying to flatter him, George confronts Steinbrenner, telling him off for doing a lousy job with the team, and Steinbrenner immediately hires him. Now, with a beautiful girlfriend, new-found confidence, and a dream job, George realizes the power of his new strategy.

George’s new life happened because he identified routine patterns of thought and behavior that don’t work, and found a new way of being that allows for growth, freedom and prosperity. His path to growth includes four essential steps:

1. Objectively look at your situation and, without blame or guilt, acknowledge that there’s a problem. When we do this, new opportunities appear that we could not have imagined
2. Be honest with yourself and with others about who you are; your inclinations, skills, strengths, and limitations. As George discovered, we are most effective, successful, and charismatic when we are honest about who we are.
3. Act with courage. George tells the two loud men in the movie theater to shut up, even though his natural inclination is to do nothing, or to run away. George found that fearful things shrink when confronted head on; they appear to be threatening thugs but are, in reality, just a lot of noise and distraction that dissolve when looked at directly.
4. Speak the truth. George learned that successful people actually want to hear the truth, even when – or especially when -  it is difficult to hear.

As George demonstrated, and as all wisdom traditions tell us, we can choose how we respond to the people and events in our lives, and create new ways of being that bring about positive transformation.

Image by thinkpublic.

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The most obvious example is the a-ha. You study a science problem from every angle, yet have no idea whether or not you really understand it; then suddenly, without any effort on your part, you suddenly “get the picture.”

To understand why our brains might have developed such a mechanism, consider how we recognize a face. You’re walking down a busy street; you subliminally see but do not consciously notice hundreds of passersby. Nevertheless, your visual system is silently looking for good matches for faces from your past. When it “recognizes” a face as being quite similar to Joe Blow, your college roommate, it notifies you that you are looking at Joe Blow. This recognition occurs at an unconscious level; the feeling of knowing that it is Joe is an unconscious visual system calculation of the likelihood that the face actually is Joe’s. Without this mechanism, all perceptions from the trivial to the urgent would be given equal weight. With this feeling of knowing as part of perception, the unconscious brain can steer us toward looking at or thinking about things that it considers important.

However, we are subject to all sorts of perceptual errors. To grasp how difficult it can be to shake an unjustified sense of correctness, look at Muller-Lyer optical illusion.

Though the two horizontal lines are exactly the same length, we “feel” that the top line is longer than the bottom one. Our intellect tells us they are equal; our unconscious perceptual processes tell us that they are unequal. Worse, even knowing they are the same length cannot dispel the clearly irrational feeling that one is longer than the other.

Take-away point #1:

Just as we cannot consciously will ourselves to see the two horizontal lines as equal, we cannot will away false feelings of knowing.

Take-away point #2:

There are two types of knowledge—that which can be scientifically (empirically) tested, and that which cannot. Whenever you have a sense of “being right,” ask yourself if this feeling can be objectively tested. For example, you can measure the length of the two horizontal lines and “know” whether they are equal or unequal. You can ask the passerby if he is Joe Blow from college.

But, for those thoughts and ideas that cannot be objectively tested, you must operate with considerable caution and due respect for the possibility that your “sense of knowing,” no matter how overwhelming, can be dead wrong.

The antidote to unjustifiable “certainty” is a healthy dose of humility. It might even be that your biology is preventing you from seeing that a contrasting view has a grain of truth.

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