Given that adversity is linked with anxiety and depression, why does compassion ever emerge from it?
.. The reason, we suspect, is that compassion isn’t as purely selfless as it might seem. While it might appear to be a response to the suffering of others, it is also a strategy for regaining your own footing — for resilience in the face of trauma. After all, having strong social relationships is one of the best predictors of psychological well-being in the long run, and so anything that enhances your bonds with others — like expressing compassion for them — makes you more resilient.
.. In an article recently published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the Kellogg School of Management professor Loran Nordgren and colleagues found that the human mind has a bit of a perverse glitch when it comes to remembering its own past hardships: It regularly makes them appear to be less distressing than they actually were.
As a result of this glitch, reflecting on your own past experience with a specific misfortune will very likely cause you to underappreciate just how trying that exact challenge can be for someone else (or was, in fact, for you at the time). You overcame it, you think; so should he. The result? You lack compassion.
.. Those who had overcome more severe bullying felt less — not more — compassion for current bullying victims. Likewise, those who had faced greater difficulty with unemployment had less sympathy for the currently jobless. When the adversities didn’t match, no such empathy gap emerged.
Autism’s Hidden Gifts
Increasingly, researchers are finding that even autistic people who seem, at first glance, to be profoundly disabled might actually be gifted in surprising ways. And these talents are not limited to quirky party tricks, like knowing whether January 5, 1956 was a Tuesday. Scientists believe they are signs of true intelligence that might be superior to that of non-autistic people.
.. Laurent Mottron, a psychiatrist at the University of Montreal who has studied autism for decades, led an analysis last year which suggested that the autistic brain seeks out the kinds of information it “prefers” to process while ignoring materials—like verbal and social cues, for example—that it doesn’t like. Just as many blind people have heightened hearing, Mottron says, the brains of autistic people might be better able to understand numbers or patterns
.. The participants were asked to think of as many non-obvious uses for a brick and a paper clip as possible. Highly autistic people in the experiment didn’t produce very many responses, but the answers they did give were highly unusual—a strong sign of creative thinking.
.. The idea that autistic brains are intrinsically deficient is one of the many myths Steve Silberman debunks in his recent book, Neurotribes. Think of the brain as an operating system, he writes: “Just because a computer is not running Windows doesn’t mean that it’s broken. Not all the features of atypical human operating systems are bugs.”
The Rationality of Rage
ANGER is a primal and destructive emotion, disrupting rational discourse and inflaming illogical passions — or so it often seems. Then again, anger also has its upsides. Expressing anger, for example, is known to be a useful tool in negotiations. Indeed, in the past few years, researchers have been learning more about when and how to deploy anger productively.
.. What does that signal communicate? According to a 2009 paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, anger evolved to help us express that we feel undervalued. Showing anger signals to others that if we don’t get our due, we’ll exert harm or withhold benefits. As they anticipated, the researchers found that strong men and attractive women — those who have historically had the most leverage in threatening harm and conferring benefits, respectively — were most prone to anger.
The Idealist Versus the Therapist
“And you’re saying that these ideals of yours — courage and compassion and contemplation — aren’t relics of the ancient world. You want us to see them as real possibilities, here and now. You concede that we in the West live in a culture that rewards pragmatism and skepticism. But you think that young people in particular ought to consider arranging their lives around these ideals. This young man might be a thinker; this young woman a warrior; another young person might live for compassion. Is that right?”
.. “If someone came into my office,” he said, “and told me that he wanted to find the enduring truth, or become saintly, or be a heroic warrior, I know exactly what I’d say to him. I’d say, ‘You are suffering from neurosis (at the very least) and you are in need of therapy, the sooner the better.’ For there are no true ideals, only idealizations. Your so-called ideals are merely sources of delusion.”
.. My talk, and my teaching from which the talk arose, were apparently inducements to mental illness, minor or major. Ideals were myths, and they could lead you into serious trouble. This was Freud’s view, I understood, and though psychotherapy has veered from Freud in many regards, it will not be easy for anyone to find a therapist who will tell you that the best way to overcome your psychological difficulties is to embrace an ideal.
.. To put it crudely, the superego wants perfection; the ego wants balance and calm; the id wants everything it can get: power and money and sex and maybe a little more sex afterward.
.. The idealist is the one who will not make deals. He puts all his resources on one spot — courage or compassion or truth — and then goes for it. He may triumph. He may crash and burn. He may, in time, do both.
.. Anthony Storr, in a book called “Psychology and the Mind”, tells of speaking with Freud’s nephew, who told Storr that “my uncle [Freud] hated music.” Storr was stunned, and assuming he misunderstood, asked for clarification.
“No,” the nephew continued, “he hated it. he was uncomfortable with the emotions it aroused.”
Well, there you have it, I thought. Anyone who hates music cannot possibly understand the first thing about human beings.
.. Pragmatism and skepticism are as neurotic and one-sided as various idealisms.
.. Therapists enable Americans to cope within American culture.
.. George Carlin said that “inside every cynical person, there is a disappointed idealist.” I heard him say it when I was a young idealist but never knew the full truth of it until I became a cynical adult