A wise old owl sat on an oak
The more he saw the less he spoke
The less he spoke the more he heard
Why aren’t we like that wise old bird?
~Unknown from 1800s
Wisdom and compassion share a common first step: listening. Owls seemingly understand this better than humans. Popularly known as a symbol of wisdom and knowledge, many may not know that the owl is also a model of altruism and compassion. We, especially in American culture, seemingly listen more in an effort to reply rather than in an attempt to understand: simply turn on the radio and television or attend a local town meeting and ask yourself if you hear more wisdom and compassion or less. With the sound of our neighborhood barred owl once again echoing in the night and the release of a new book by Tony Angell (The House of Owls), I couldn’t help thinking of not only how owls epitomize the blend or union of wisdom and compassion but also what that symbolism might mean for us in an everyday sense. The basic lesson for me is: we must listen more than we talk because listening is essential for acquiring wisdom and understanding as well as for developing compassion and kindness.
An owl listens to understand its environment. It listens so carefully and intensely that scientists have found that the neurons multiply in the auditory part of its brain; typical neurons in a human simply add. It takes the idea of ‘listening to learn’ to another level. Imagine being so focused on listening that you could pinpoint any change in your environment or in the people you are with at any given moment. It would truly be a heightened sense of awareness. The owl, in essence, improves its understanding and awareness by literally and figuratively multiplying its focus on listening. It synthesizes at least three different auditory signals at once. Although I love and support our use of the owl as a symbol of wisdom, I wish we would understand why our symbolism is correct: it is the owl’s listening ability that makes it wise.
Researchers have recently discovered another owl trait that makes them unique among birds: altruism. A study in the journal Animal Behaviour found that barn owls share food with their “smaller, hungrier siblings.” Although such generous behavior is considered rare in the aviary world, the existence of owl altruism weakens the Hobbesian argument that the animal instincts to be selfish, “nasty and brutish” are the foundation of human action. The way of the owl supports the Lockean notion that the basic instinct of humanity is founded on kindness, generosity and caring. While human social reality is a mixture of both Hobbesian and Lockean ideas, the way of the owl asks us to shift the balance of explanatory power regarding the basis of human action from Hobbes to Locke. From business to politics to sports, most of our culture promotes Hobbesian thinking over Lockean thought. If the Hobbesian argument is right, however, can the owl really be the only instinctually altruistic sentient being? Even Charles Darwin said no. Yes, the same Darwin who many still erroneously believe is synonymous with the phrase “survival of the fittest.”
In The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin challenged what he wrote in On The Origin of Species. In the newer work he said “I perhaps attributed too much to the action of natural selection or the survival of the fittest,” and “it hardly seems probable, that the number of men gifted with such virtues [as bravery and sympathy]…could be increased through natural selection, that is, by the survival of the fittest….for those communities, which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members, would flourish best, and rear the greatest number of offspring.” Darwin’s use of the word “sympathy,” in the words of Paul Ekman, “today would be termed empathy, altruism, or compassion.” Darwin even called compassion “the almost ever-present instinct” when a fellow human being witnesses the suffering of another. The bumper sticker way of teaching and labeling Darwin’s ideas as exclusively focused on “survival of the fittest” is not only misleading, but it completely misses his idea that humanity’s success hinges on its compassion or sympathy.
Speaking of Darwin, did you ever wonder why we were born with two ears and one mouth? Just as the success of any owl is based upon the strength of its listening ability so is the success of any person. Are you ready to fly powered by listening and balanced on the wings of wisdom and compassion? Do you have the strength to follow the way of the owl?
BOOKS & ARTICLES:
Natalie Angier, “The Owl Comes Into Its Own,” The New York Times (February 25, 2013)
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2nd ed. (1874), esp. chapters 2, 4 and 5
Paul Ekman, “Darwin’s Compassionate View of Human Nature,” Journal of the American Medical Association, vol. 303, no. 6 (10 February 2010): 557-558.
Paul Ekman, “Survival of the Kindest,” Mindful: Taking Time for What Matters
Kate Wong, “Owl Hearing Relies on Advanced Math,” Scientific American (April 13, 2001)
Julie Zickefoose, “Wise Guys,” a book review of Tony Angell’s The House of Owls in The Wall Street Journal (April 24, 2015)
Is compassion still necessary is akin to asking whether thinking is still necessary? While not everyone may practice thinking, thankfully most people believe it necessary. The same can be said of compassion. A world where most people are not compassionate would be a world without progress; for compassion is about holistically understanding the world around you so that you can find solutions to problems, thereby improving the quality of life. Compassion is necessary, especially if you want the world to progress. Even in a world full of compassion, it would still be necessary because compassion is like love; the more you use it, the more there is of it. In short, compassion will always be necessary just as thinking will be.
The host of Tipping Point Radio’s The Mastermind Show, Craig Meriwether, recently interviewed me for a specific program called “Is Compassion Still Necessary?” Craig and I discussed a wide range of issues as they relate to compassion such as politics, education, neuroscience, parenting, economics, religion and even video games. I hope that you’ll take a 45 minute ‘mindwalk’ about compassion with me and Craig: Click here to listen to the show.
If you are into any aspect of neuroscience or simply a zombie, this is one of the best weeks of the year: it’s Brain Awareness Week (March 16–22, 2015). Brain research, especially over the last decade, has provided unique and helpful insights into problems and questions in many areas and disciplines including computer science, economics, education, philosophy, politics, psychology and robotics. An area of neuroscience research with the potential to profoundly change the way we think and interact in society (from classrooms to living rooms to boardrooms) is the work being done in labs focused on understanding the difference between compassion and empathy. The compassion-empathy difference is more than semantic; the consequences are pragmatic. The distinction is real and so is its effect on society: knowing the difference can help individuals build resiliency and avoid burnout as well as turn “empathy gaps,” which have recently made headlines, into junctures for local community and national strength.
Compassion and empathy are not synonymous. Empathy is feeling the same emotion as someone else and compassion is feeling kindness towards another person. Where empathy is about stepping into the shoes of another to understand and share their feelings, compassion is about acquiring a 360 degrees understanding of the suffering or problem that a person is experiencing and taking action to resolve it. Compassion is a two-step process of understanding and acting but empathy is only one step and it is about emotionally absorbing the feelings of another.
Our brain knows the difference between compassion and empathy even if we aren’t aware of it. Tania Singer, director of neuroscience at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Lepzig, Germany has used MRI scanners to show that compassion and empathy “are two different phenomena associated with different brain activity patterns.” When we think compassionately we “light up” the same regions of the brain as love but empathetic thinking lights up regions associated with pain.
The neuroscience effect of having compassion at the forefront of our thinking is positive for each of us as individuals and for our communities. The effect, in very basic terms, is that when we think from a compassionate mindset, we release the peptide hormone oxytocin, which then activates the neurotransmitters of dopamine (brain reward) and serotonin (anxiety reduction) contributing to happiness and optimism—two characteristics that contribute to success.
Compassion’s strength as a power source for fostering communal as well as individual success is that it is not only derived from the same neural networks as love but it is centrally focused on the concern and care for others. When empathy is used as the source for helping another, the central motivation is to alleviate your own pain and stress. And that egocentric motivation is, I believe, one of the keys for understanding why burnout occurs much easier when we think empathetically. Emotionally absorbing another’s feelings, which empathy entails, is physically draining and can make you feel metaphorically stuck in quicksand. Compassion, on the other hand, keeps the emotional quicksand at a distance by using a more cognitive understanding of a person’s suffering when attempting to alleviate the pain: understanding without absorbing. We have confused compassion fatigue with empathy fatigue and that confusion has been reflected repeatedly in major media outlets over the last few months. If our society’s caregivers (i.e., nurses, paramedics, doctors, social workers, police and fire personnel, etc…) could learn how to harness the power of compassion, they would be helping themselves just as much as they are helping others. Their resiliency is an important source of our community strength.
Research has clearly shown that compassion can be taught and learned. Envision a world in which economics, education, medicine and even politics are infused with more compassion. Practicing compassion in politics would not only help Congress to act but act constructively. Imagine politicians who do more than say “I feel your pain” (empathy) but actually understand and do something about it (compassion): we would have more politicians who act with principles rather than for principal. Our modern political world could reflect the words of President Lincoln: “Republicans are for both the man and the dollar; but in case of conflict, the man before the dollar.”
Let’s fill in life’s empathy gaps with the compassion two-step. Let’s ride the neural networks of compassion to stronger and more resilient communities. While Dr. Singer and others are researching “whether it is possible to transform people’s empathetic reactions into compassionate action,” shouldn’t we just simply create waves of kindness that our neural networks naturally want to ride?
(NOTE: This piece is based on an entry I made last year on the difference between compassion and empathy with more emphasis on how neuroscience and social science interact in honor of Brain Awareness Week.)
BOOKS & ARTICLES:
Cognitive Neuroscience Society, “Feeling Others’ Pain: Transforming Empathy into Compassion,” (June 24, 2013).
Dacher Keltner, Jason Marsh and Jeremy Adam Smith (eds.), The Compassionate Instinct (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2010).
Jason DeParle, “Our Kids, by Robert D. Putnam,” The New York Times ( March 4, 2015).
Nicholas Kristof, “Where’s the Empathy?” The New York Times (January 24, 2015).
Nicholas Kristof, “How do we Increase Empathy?” The New York Times (January 29, 2015).
Kai Kupferschmidt, “Concentrating on Kindness,” Science (September 19, 2013).
Helen Y. Weng, et. al., “Compassion Training Alters Altruism and Neural Responses to Suffering,” Association for Psychological Science (May 2013).
Paul Zak, The Moral Molecule: The Source of Love and Prosperity (New York: Penguin Group Inc., 2012).
Teachers are the artists who help us paint who we are and the astronauts who help us explore the people we become. Teaching is a profession that explores and experiences, in the words of The Outer Limits intro, “the awe and mystery that reaches from the deepest inner-mind … to the outer limits.” Teachers mold our minds and help us reach for the stars. The best educators know that there is an art to teaching and science, especially neuroscience, is just beginning to help us understand how great teaching creates inspired learning.
My talk for the Jesse Lewis Choose Love Foundation’s 2014 workshop for teachers titled “The Science of Artful Teaching” explains how and why great teachers are both artists and astronauts. The talk, which is part of my Inspiring Teachers Talks (The IT Talks), weaves together research in neuroscience, education and even cosmology to show educators that what and how they teach literally and figuratively paints and sculpts their students’ brains and futures.
If you are willing to explore the cosmos, the brain and be “blinded by science” all in an effort to understand the power and influence of a teacher, then “The Science of Artful Teaching” is for you.
Here’s my talk.
When turtles cry, butterflies swarm. From the sea turtle to the yellow-spotted river turtle of the Amazon rain forest, turtles shed tears. Their tears are not of sadness or joy but tears of cleansing and strength. While the biological reason turtles cry is to remove excess salt from their body, their tears are used by butterflies for sustenance. Butterflies drink the tears of turtles. The tears provide salt in sodium scarce regions where butterflies live. Nature has a beautiful way of weaving compassion into the fabric of life and we could learn a lesson or two from such beauty.
When we see another suffering, we should swarm to help. Helping others helps strengthen your community and even yourself in ways that science is just revealing. In terms of community building, Milena Tsvetkova and Michael Macy concluded in “The Science of Paying It Forward” that “the next time you stop to help a stranger, you may be helping not only this one particular individual but potentially many others downstream…We conclude that observing an act of kindness is likely to play an important role in setting a cascade of generosity in motion.” Research by scholars such as Shawn Achor, Jonathan Haidt, Dacher Keltner and Paul Zak shows that when we help others we release hormones such as oxytocin that increase our own happiness while decreasing stress and anxiety.
A dear friend of mine with whom I work closely with, Scarlett Lewis, has turned her tears for her youngest son, Jesse, into strength for tens of thousands of people. Instead of cocooning herself from the world after she lost her 6 year old Jesse in the Sandy Hook tragedy, Scarlett initiated and is leading a movement to weave “nurturing, healing and love” into schools and businesses across the country (her foundation of which I am a member of the board of directors is called the Jesse Lewis Choose Love Foundation). From school children in Hawaii to prisoners in Massachusetts and teachers in Connecticut, I’ve watched Scarlett provide hope to people who had fallen into the compassion and empathy gaps of our world. Her struggle through loss has nourished resiliency in others. Her tears are symbols of strength to many who have become the butterflies of her life’s work.
We’ve all known about butterfly kisses and their symbolism for tender love, but turtle tears (new to many of us) are symbols of strength when sadness appears and resiliency seems scarce. Learning about the butterfly’s dependence upon the tears of a turtle leads me to wonder: would there be any butterfly kisses without turtle tears? Our tears in life can always be turned into streams of strength and beauty if we choose to follow the turtle.
Shawn Achor, The Happiness Advantage (New York: Crown Business, 2010).
Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis (New York: Basic Books, 2006).
Dacher Keltner, Jason Marsh and Jeremy Adam Smith (eds.), The Compassionate Instinct (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2010).
Douglas Main, “Must-See: Amazonian Butterflies Drink Turtle Tears,” LiveScience (September 11, 2013).
Milena Tsvetkova and Michael Macy, “The Science of Paying It Forward,” The New York Times (March 14, 2014).
Paul Zak, The Moral Molecule: How Trust Works (New York: Penguin Group Inc., 2012).
Who wants to make education more efficient at being ineffective? Although I sincerely believe that no one does, many education leaders on America’s local, state and national levels are establishing policies that are walking our schools down a path of efficient ineffectiveness. A central reason we are on such a path is that policymakers seem to be following the misguided belief that efficiency and effectiveness inevitably go hand-in-hand. I wish they always did go hand-in-hand but while authoritarian dictatorships may be politically efficient, for instance, I certainly wouldn’t call them effective. Enron was efficient at making money but how effective would you rate it? Efficiency and effectiveness do not always go together and sometimes we tip the scale toward one at the cost of the other. We are tipping the scale toward efficiency at the cost of effectiveness in American education.
If we should err in education, and to err is human, we should always err on the side of effectiveness rather than efficiency. However, possibly because of confusion over what the two words mean, we have Mayors and Boards of Finance in cities and towns throughout this country so focused on efficiency that they are making our schools less effective. They think that they can find effectiveness through efficiency in education and “the cart before the horse” analogy doesn’t even begin to describe the problem with that type of thinking.
Effectiveness is about achieving the desired result and efficiency is about the process of doing things in an optimal way such as doing it the fastest or in the least expensive way. Effectiveness is about achieving the right goals (i.e., learning) and efficiency is about doing something optimally (i.e., standardized tests), which can be right or wrong. If you do something wrong but you do it optimally, you still are efficient—just efficiently wrong. A real world example of this on the local level is when a policymaker argues that a city or town can be more efficient in technology by combining the job of the information technology (IT) officer at city/town hall with the IT officer for the school district, thereby converting two jobs into one (efficient). The problem is that the city/town software expertise is very different than what is needed and required for having an effective education technology officer. It is the same faulty logic for arguing that a patent attorney will be just as effective as a criminal defense attorney in defending you at a criminal trial because they are both lawyers.
We have international test scores (i.e., Program for International Student Assessment) for over 10 years that demonstrate a problem with our education system’s effectiveness but our policymakers are seeking to make it more efficient rather than effective. “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four,” according to President Abraham Lincoln, “sharpening the axe.” We have yet to sharpen the axe of education but policymakers want us (teachers at every level of schooling) to start swinging away with less resources and more standardized tests.
While I believe that the Common Core will make our education system more effective (see my previous blog titled “How I Learned to Eat the Core”), I think the emphasis on standardized testing will weaken it. The quest for efficiency has led to the implementation of annual standardized tests but do standardized test results provide an indication of effective education? The research literature on the science of learning (which education should be all about) has a clear and definitive answer: NO. Standardized tests may be an efficient way of measuring education levels but it is definitely not the most effective means of learning. Recent books on learning (i.e., Brown, Roediger and McDaniel’s Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning as well as Carey’s How We Learn: The Surprising Truth about When, Where, and Why it Happens) clearly show that the problem with standardized testing is that there is too much information being tested too infrequently for learning to “stick” in the brain. The most effective way of making information “stick” in a student’s mind, according to neuroscience research, is to institute a “regimen of regular low- or no-stakes” testing (a.k.a. quizzing) timely spaced so that students begin to forget—it is the counterintuitive notion of forgetting to learn and it is called spaced learning.
Arne Duncan (United States Secretary of Education), however, made headlines a few days ago by stating that the “Administration is Committed to Testing” (interesting note: the headline was changed three days later to “White House Still Backs Annual Testing in Schools”). No matter the headline, shouldn’t we be committed to learning rather than testing? We have created a very efficient form of education via standardized tests but the literature on the science of learning shows that they are the least effective means of educating students. The imbalance of efficiency over effectiveness in education is reflected in the overemphasis on words such as standardization and accountability in political speeches. As Jonathan Zimmerman wrote in the December 4, 2014 New York Review of Books article titled “Why is American Teaching So Bad?”:
“No Child Left Behind and its spin-offs are premised on the grim notion that teachers will work harder—and better—if we can somehow pinpoint their performance and connect it to rewards and punishments. But the fact is that the new measures adopted under Race to the Top—measures purporting to identify the effectiveness of each teacher based on students’ test scores—are notoriously imprecise…According to the logic of those at the top, these people just need a good kick in the pants and everything else will take care of itself…But ‘accountability’ makes our best teachers do their job worse, which is the ultimate indictment of contemporary education reform. The endless battery of standardized tests takes many weeks away from real instruction. So do the long cycles of preparing for the exams, during which thoughtful American teachers are forced to tailor their practice to the mindless demands of the system.”
Albert Einstein’s 1929 words on standardization are as true now as when he wrote them: “I believe in standardizing automobiles. I do not believe in standardizing human beings. Standardization is a great peril which threatens American culture.”
The efficiency obsession in education is an offshoot from the business world where problems with an imbalance favoring efficiency over effectiveness have not only been experienced but researched and documented. As Stefanos Mouzas, a professor at Lancaster University’s School of Management, wrote in the conclusion of his article “Efficiency v. Effectiveness in Business Networks”: “Efficiency and effectiveness are central terms in assessing and measuring the performance of organisations or inter-organisational arrangements. It seems, however, that managers rarely understand the difference between efficiency and effectiveness and the exact meaning of these terms. The present article indicates that currently, in many companies, managers are obsessed with efficiency gains and that this propensity to efficiency is preventing them from achieving differentiation and sustainable growth of their business.” The efficiency versus effectiveness problems are much more acute in education than in business because we are working with human beings, not widgets.
While we all want an education that is efficient and effective, recent education policies and priorities are creating a system of educating that seeks efficiency at the cost of effectiveness. An emphasis on efficiency over effectiveness has taken root in the United States education system to such an extent that it is making the American way of educating become more efficient at being ineffective. An effective education, one resulting in learning, is not always efficient. It takes time to sharpen the axe of education. Shouldn’t every student be afforded the time to sharpen the axe before making their own path in the world?
Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III and Mark A. McDaniel, Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014).
Benedict Carey, How We Learn: The Surprising Truth about When, Where, and Why it Happens (New York: Random House, 2014).
Stefanos, Mouzas, “Efficiency v. Effectiveness in Business Networks,” Journal of Business Research, vol. 59, no 10-11 (2006).
Motoko Rich, “White House Still Backs Annual Testing in Schools,” The New York Times (January 12, 2015).
Jonathan Zimmerman, “Why is American Teaching so Bad?” The New York Review of Books (December 4, 2014).
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