Tania Singer

Can care be trained? Tania Singer has spent more than thirty years putting that question to brain scanners, and her answer is yes. Empathy is what we ask of nurses, teachers and carers of every kind. It is also, she found, what can wear them out if empathy turns into empathic distress. She learned that in experiments she did with Matthieu Ricard, the French biologist turned Tibetan monk. Lying in a brain scanner, he watched footage of suffering children. She expected to see his pain network light up; what she saw instead were the regions tied to affiliation, positive affect and reward. As he did not show the expected pain areas, she wondered whether he was thinking about lunch instead of suffering with the children. Asked to switch to ordinary empathy, he indeed showed strong activation in areas related to negative emotional states of distress, and therefore started to tire out much faster. Empathy and compassion are based on two evolutionarily old but different brain networks. Her further research with those without any meditation experience revealed a similar pattern.

A global pioneer in empathy and compassion research, Tania is a professor of social neuroscience and psychology and heads the Max Planck Society's Social Neuroscience Lab in Berlin, Germany. She has published more than 160 papers, cited over 56,000 times, and delivered over 500 keynote speeches and talks. Across all of it, she builds bridges between fields that seldom meet: science with the contemplative traditions of the East, neuroscience with economics, science with the arts.

"I was born as a we," Tania says. She and her identical twin sister Nathalie had a twin language before their parents could understand either of them. Psychology, when she trained in it, was all "just cognition and focused on the individual" -- nothing about "the we and the social." She helped build the field that was missing: social neuroscience. The bridge to contemplative sciences arrived by accident. In 2004, the same year her empathy research drew wide attention, she was in the Himalayas with Nathalie, filming the overtone chanting of Gyuto monks, when she wandered into a Mind and Life conference on brain plasticity with the Dalai Lama and Western scientists. When back in London, she reached out to Mind and Life with a conference proposal. It began a long working relationship with contemplative practitioners, which also shifted her research focus from empathy to compassion.

She initiated and headed one of the largest secular studies on the mental training of mindfulness, compassion and perspective taking, the ReSource project. It took 332 people through nine months of daily contemplative practice, in three phases: attention to breath and body; compassion and the handling of difficult emotions; understanding another person's perspective. It has produced more than forty peer-reviewed papers. One major finding was that "it matters what you practice." Three months of attention-based mindfulness practice made people more attentive; it did not make them any more compassionate or altruistic toward anyone. "The effect of your mental practice depends on what type of mental practice or meditation you do," she says.

The second big finding was the power of two. Some practices in the study were solitary, as classic meditation practices are, but some were done with another person -- the so-called contemplative Dyads. Here you take turns to speak honestly and explore certain questions while the other listens without judging, changing practice partner each week. Those dyad practices lowered people's stress hormones in stressful social situations. Practicing mindfulness meditation via app alone did not. In a follow-up study, the CovSocial project, she developed a 10-week online program during the COVID-19 pandemic. Set against people meditating alone for the same minutes a day via an app, those who practiced in pairs came out less lonely, more resilient and connected -- and they were the ones still practicing more, and for longer, after the study had ended and nobody was asking. Presently, through the Edu:Social Project, she is bringing these dyads into education and health-care settings to boost resilience and social competencies in those spaces.

Years earlier, among economists in Zurich, Tania found herself "a bit shocked" to see that the field's founding assumptions were "absolutely not in line at all with what we know in psychology or from biology." Her objection was empirical, not just moral. Economics assumes a single motive, what they call preference, namely: self-interest. Psychology finds several, and care is among the oldest motivational systems. She became Europe's first professor of neuroeconomics, and has since worked with the macroeconomist Dennis Snower on economic models that begin from care, and convened the Dalai Lama dialogues behind Caring Economics and Power and Care.

Science was not Tania's first plan. Through high school she was a director's assistant in the opera houses of Frankfurt and Freiburg, and studied flamenco, juggling and pantomime. Her dream of directing opera went on hold when she took a PhD, but she continues to create bridges between science and the arts, including a free multi-media book on compassion with photos from the artist Olafur Eliasson and sound collages from her sister Nathalie. Work has taken her to nearly every continent, and she goes with a camera, making picture books from her travels. She cooks, crediting her French grandmother and mother -- "the best cooks on earth" -- and the never-ending family meals of her childhood. Put her in a new city and she strolls its food markets, taking photos, discovering a culture through its food.

Join Menka Sanghvi in conversation with this social neuroscientist of the space between two people, who has spent a career showing that what passes between us can be trained -- and that it cannot be trained alone.