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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Responding from the heart in the face of difficulties is the road less traveled. It is what distinguishes our most inspirational heroes, such as Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Mary Stokes Paul.

I think of the heart as a powerful and loving energy that will not allow our integrity to be compromised and will not compromise the integrity of anyone else. Responding to a potential conflict from the heart leaves us feeling best about ourselves, like our own hero and opens the door for a deepening intimacy in our relationships.

There are many feelings and behaviors that describe the heart, such as love, warmth, and caring. Simply put, they all embody compassion and learning.

In an upsetting situation there are always very important reasons for beliefs, behavior, thoughts or feelings. With an attitude of compassion, we respectfully engage in:

1. Wanting to deeply understand the other person’s position.
2. Learning about our own position and any part we may have in the difficulty.
3. Searching for resolutions that preserve everyone’s integrity.

Although staying heart-connected in the face of upsets is an ideal that no one is always able to maintain, losing our heart does not cause the worst of our difficulties. Failing to learn from those experiences is the Achilles heel that festers into serious relationship problems.

The essential first step in living more heart-connected is to know when you have lost your heart connection. A simple way to know this is to ask yourself, “Am I feeling compassion and am I open to learning about myself and my partner?” Without that awareness you are stuck.

Once you realize that you are disconnected you can:

• Take personal responsibility and acknowledge that you have lost your heart connection. For example, “In trying to prove my point and change you. I lost my heart and I feel badly about that.”
• Do something to regain your center, such as taking some deep breaths or a time out.
• Learn more about the beliefs and fears that created your disconnection. “There are some important issues for me to confront here and I am committed to working on them. I’d also like to know more about your thoughts and feelings.”
• Express sadness about any wounding that occurred when you were disconnected and clean up the difficulties that resulted. Such as, “I feel badly that I disrespected you, and I would like to heal any bad feelings.”
• Begin a compassionate dialogue to resolve the difficulties. “Is there anything else you’re needing before we can try again to get through this issue, and in particular, are you needing anything else from me?

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