Tania: If we talk about empathy, we really just mean emotional resonance. You are in pain, I'm suffering with you, right? So my brain is suffering with you as well. It's meaning I'm sharing your emotion.

If you are happy, I'm sharing your happiness. If you are disgusted, I share your disgust in empathy, right? Now, what we discovered, and that was also by chance, in a way, because after I did this first empathy experiment in London. A lot of people said, now you have to train empathy, right?

This is what we call plasticity research in neuroscience, right? Does the brain change if you train these empathic, these social emotions? So I asked Buddhist monks to come into the scanner, and particularly one Buddhist monk I had met through the Mind and Life Institute with the Dalai Lama. It's a cooperation between Western scientists and the Dalai Lama.

And he was a researcher himself, Mathieu Ricard, he was a microbiologist, so he said, look, I'm going into the scanner as an expert brain, because I was looking for experts who have done thousands of hours. Of, let's say, empathy, compassion, meditation, or practice, so that we can call them experts, right? Pianists do thousands of hours of piano training. And so I asked Mathieu, and I said, could you, as an expert, because you as a Buddhist monk have done thousands of hours.

And at that time, I thought empathy, compassion is the same thing. So I said, you did thousands of hours of compassion, so your empathic brain should be lighting up like a Christmas tree, right? So we asked him to go in the scanner, and what I saw, when he engaged in what we called compassion meditation, meta-meditation, all these Buddhist practices. It was actually a kind of positive reward network, which would light up, which we would see when we engage in positive emotion of warmth, of love, of reward, of getting a chocolate.

So I was totally astonished. I was like, is he not suffering with these people? He had to imagine suffering people. What is he doing?

Is he thinking about lunch, or the cake he wants to eat after scanning? Because... He is certainly not showing any of the pain matrix lighting up, right, which I would expect. So I asked him, and I said, look, Mathieu, I'm a bit confused.

You don't show the networks I would expect if you suffer with these kids from an orphanage. He imagined a BBC video he had seen a day before, with starving kids and very suffering videos. And he said, no, you didn't ask me to share these kids' pain. You said I should engage in compassion meta-meditation, which is pure love, and this is pure concern and the motivation to help them, an altruistic motivation.

And that's what I'm doing, right? I'm full on doing it, I'm not thinking about dessert. Erin D. And I was totally confused.

I was like, okay, so can we plot just for the sake of science? You go back into the scanner, and you then only suffer with these children so that I can see. Whether you have a pain network, whether you are able to actually suffer with our definition of empathy. And then he did that, and we saw the whole pain network lighting up, so he was able to really suffer with these children.

And then the interesting part happened, because. I said, okay, Mathieu, now I know you have an empathic brain network, you have this pain network, you can do empathy, right? It is the same, then, in our naive participants. But, you can go out.

And he said, no, please. I'm burning out of this empathic distress, right? We call it empathic distress. If you are suffering too much with these people, right?

And it becomes your own suffering. You can't disentangle it anymore. It becomes your own. It's not vicariously anymore, oh, that's the suffering of the other, but I'm here.

It is becoming my own. And that was what happened to Mathieu because he engaged so much in empathy that he said, I want to do two, three blocks of compassion and meta practice and loving kindness. Because of my own sake, right? I want to go out of the scanner in some better state, in a more wholesome, positive state.

So, then he did three blocks of this other compassion meditation, and then we saw this other network, what we call now the Compassion Network. In the brain lighting up of him, which is much more network of positive affect, feeling, and so on. So, this is where we discovered by chance, both of us. A distinction between empathy, empathic distress, and compassion, and we did a lot of experiments afterward over years.

Not just with some Buddhist monks who basically train thousands of hours of this meditation. But with students, people who have never done that, who had absolutely no idea of meditation, and we just instructed them. And we scanned their brains while they were looking at movies like BBC News footage of suffering people in the world. And then we ask them one time, please just go into resonance with the suffering and practically engage.

And in the other week, we ask them to generate this love and this compassion and this altruistic motivation and goodwill, and we saw also in naive people, right, we saw these two different networks. So this is where we started working on the difference between empathy, empathic distress, and compassion, and how to train. Now we are training people in how to recognize when they are in which state, because it's not so obvious, right? So we have developed meditations and mental training modules, how to teach healthcare providers how to get out of empathic distress if they went into it.

How to avoid getting from a healthy empathy into distress. Right. Because empathy is healthy.