Bruce Miller & Virginia Sturm on Why the Social Brain Holds the Key to Our Humanity | EP 658

0:00Coming up next on PassionStruck. Empathy allows us to feel all sorts of things, good things, positive things, bad things or negative things. So the same system in the brain might allow us to feel the pain of a loved one who is injured or sick, but also to share in the joy of their success or experiencing something amazing or beautiful in life. Like you said, it's that resonance system that allows us to reverberate in our bodies with that other person's experiences, be they good or bad. Welcome to Passion Struck. Hi, I'm your host, John R. Miles. And on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you.

0:52Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself. If you're new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays. We have long form interviews the rest of the week with guests ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes. Now let's go out there and become passion struck. Welcome back, friends, to PassionStruck episode 658. I want to start by thanking each of you for being here. Week after week, over a third of you return to listen, and that loyalty fuels this movement.

1:33If you haven't had a chance yet to leave a rating or review, I'd be so grateful if you took just 30 seconds to do so. It's the best way for others to find and join us. We just wrapped up our Rediscovering Wellness series, where we reframe wellness not as diet or hacks, but as a four-part journey. Fuel, feel, fulfill, and flow. In my closing solo, I introduced the fragmentation gap, the hidden divide between the selves we present and the wholeness we crave. And today, I'm opening a new series that I'm calling Decoding Humanity. Over the next five weeks, we'll be exploring the foundations of who we are, our biology, psychology, trauma, identity, community, and the stories we live by.

2:15Because only when we understand what makes us human, can we begin to build lives that aren't just optimized, but whole? That's exactly why I wanted to start out this series with today's conversation. My guests are Dr. Bruce Miller and Dr. Virginia Sturm, leaders at UCSF's Memory and Aging Center and co-authors of the new book, Mysteries of the Soul Brain. Their work has uncovered how the circuits in our brain shape empathy, fairness, creativity, and even our moral compass. And what they found is transformative. Emotions like awe, compassion, and gratitude aren't soft extras. They are biological capacities that determine our vitality, our identity, and our longevity.

2:59What fascinated me and why I chose this episode for the series is that their work reframes how we think about brain health. For so long, we've been taught to focus on memory and cognition. But Miller and Sturm show us that the social brain, our ability to connect, to feel deeply, to share awe, may be just as important as exercise or sleep and protecting against dementia and shaping how we age. In this episode, we'll unpack why empathy is hardwired into the brain, not just a personality trait. We'll go into how positive emotions literally change our nervous system, why the right hemisphere, the silent side of the brain, holds so much of our social intelligence, and why nurturing our social brain is so important.

3:39Before we dive in, a quick reminder. Our new store, StartMattering.com, is now live. It's part of the mattering revolution, a movement that I've built on one truth. You matter, live like it. Every hoodie, tee, and hat carries that message, reminding you daily of your worth and sparkling ripples of change far beyond yourself. Head over to StartMattering.com and wear the movement. Now, let's dive into this powerful conversation on the mysteries of the social brain with Dr. Bruce Miller and Dr. Virginia Sturm. Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life.

4:17Now, let that journey begin.

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5:26I am so honored today to have Dr. Bruce Miller and Dr. Virginia Sturm on PassionStruck. Welcome, Bruce and Virginia. Thank you, John. Really excited to be with you today. Thank you so much for having us. And today we are going to be exploring your brand new book, Mysteries of the Social Brain. Congratulations on its release. Thank you. It was a long effort. Virginia and I went back and forth on this for actually, sorry to say, but years, John. In your research, you describe empathy not as a soft skill, but as a neurobiological capacity. that's rooted in brain circuits. What do most people must understand about what empathy really is and isn't?

6:11Empathy is a word that we use often in everyday life, but it's actually quite complicated and has a lot of different elements to it that we can measure and study in different ways. So sometimes when people refer to empathy, they mean, I recognize how you're feeling, or I understand your perspective. And that's what we refer to as cognitive empathy. And that's a pretty complicated form of empathy, but there are simpler forms of empathy that we call emotional empathy. And those have to do with the ability to experience vicariously how others are feeling. We mirror people's facial expressions and bodily postures, and even our heart rates can synchronize.

6:58And that kind of simpler, more automatic form of empathy is present in other species and infants. And these two kinds of empathy kind of work together. And you can have one without the other, but it's often more helpful when they kind of work in conjunction. So we feel how someone feels and then we can better understand how they're feeling. And all of this is organized by the brain. And I think that part is often not appreciated as much, but just like our memory systems and our language systems and our movement systems. There are systems in the brain that help us to empathize and to be social creatures.

7:32Well, I opened up with that because what you both have written a lot about is the way that we connect socially is not just emotional, it's biological. But empathy to me is one of the most important aspects that we have. And it seems like some of us are wired for it and some of us are wired less for it. Do you find that is actually a real thing? I think so. Just like any human ability, there's a normal range of strengths and weaknesses. We all have strengths and weaknesses. Some of us are really good at playing tennis and others are really good at solving math equations and empathy is just another mobility.

8:13Yeah, like you said, I think some people are born just more prone for empathy and some are less, but we all can work at it and improve it if it's something that we value and want to have in our lives. And I always think that as you talk about this range of abilities, this is really important. And I think in public education, we think a lot about, as Virginia touched on math or reading or writing, but what about empathy? What about how much my son or grandson cares for someone else in the class. And really thinking about this in the same serious way that we think about math, I think is really critical for a society.

8:57I think teachers know it. We all know it in the workplace there. Some people where a deficiency in empathy is really a problem. And we evolved from a primate that lived very isolated into large groups. and without empathy, without that feeling of caring for what one of our loved ones is feeling and without being altruistic and thinking about ways to help others in our group, we suffer enormously in a society. I'm going to take a step back and then we're going to come back to these different elements like empathy here in a second. But you guys write that humans are wired to interact, connect, and innovate.

9:44And yet many of those capacities live in the right hemisphere, not the logical left. That's so many of us prize. Why do you believe our culture has so thoroughly undervalued the social brain? I think we take for granted these skills. They tend to be sorted away as if they have nothing to do with the brain. And I think this is a terrible mistake. The right hemisphere where these capacities primarily lie is silent. It doesn't speak. It doesn't advocate for itself. So we require the left side of the brain to talk about the things that the right hemisphere does. And I think that dichotomy is a bit of a paradox and maybe is one of the reasons that we humans tend to talk about the skills that we have in our left hemisphere.

10:39And people don't think of this as an intelligence. This is our intelligence. This is the most noble and important thing that the human brain can do, is touch others and protect others. And this combination of emotion and cognition that really good people devote to others is one of our finest and most developed human traits. So when it involves the social brain, you found that there's six foundational traits, if I have it correct. Empathy, which we touched on earlier, respect, fairness, self-awareness, openness, and creativity. Do I have those right? You got it. Which of these traits most surprised you two in how it's neurologically wired?

11:30For me, the big surprise, and I began to realize this only fairly recently in my career in Virginia, who is a social psychologist and neuroscientist, really helped me to understand that. But that these set of values, fairness, respect, courage, openness, these are wired in the brain. And just like learning how to remember, we can improve and perfect these particular skills. So this whole notion that the traits that many of us admire so much can be learned, can be developed, can be cultivated. for me was rather new. I spoke recently with the president of a university and I was talking about this and this person, I won't give their name, they said, well, I don't think you can teach empathy.

12:25I don't think you can teach fairness. And I think, sadly, this is how we parcel away these values that are so much, just like every other skill we have, learnable. Thank you for sharing that. And in the book, one section that I found interesting is you quote neuroscientist Dr. Singer's finding that the interior insula activates not only when we feel pain, but when we witness pain in someone we love. And I found that to be interesting because you two are both at University of California in San Francisco. I interviewed Dacher Keltner, who's at Berkeley, not too far away from you. And we were talking about his concept of moral beauty and that when we see someone express moral beauty, it makes us inside awaken parts of the brain.

13:20And I found it interesting how it works in a similar way. Could you maybe touch on, I'm not sure if you're familiar with his work on moral beauty, but maybe this concept of how moments like this reframe empathy, not as a choice, but maybe as a shared biological resonance. I think empathy allows us to feel all sorts of things, good things, positive things, bad things or negative things. So the same system in the brain might allow us to feel the pain of a loved one who is injured or sick, but also to share in the joy of their success or experiencing something amazing or beautiful in life. Like you said, it's that resonance system that allows us to reverberate in our bodies with that other person's experiences, be they good or bad.

14:17So I think empathy lies at the root of exactly what you're describing in terms of experiences of more beauty or pain. And there might be differences in the sides of the brain that participate more strongly in the good things or the bad things or the positive or negative experiences. But overall, the systems are in common. We do a Dakar Keltner. He was, I think, one of Virginia's teachers, and he's a really great thinker in this space. Yes. Yes, I worked with him when I was a student at Berkeley and continue to collaborate with Dacher. I love Dacher's work and love it when I can get him on the show.

14:53So that would have been quite the experience to actually get to work with them in the lab as well. So I'm awesome. Yeah, it was great. So in the book, you have a number of stories and I want to talk about Thomas's story, and then we'll get to Ann Adams. But you all, and I'll let you tell the story, describe Thomas's as devastating. He lived in a cocoon devoid of emotions, you write. And he was someone, as we've been discussing, empathy lost the capacity for empathy. And what I wanted to ask is if you could tell a story and then maybe how should loved ones and even clinicians begin to define after you lose a capacity like that, who does that person become?

15:44So Thomas startled me and really our whole team at UCSF when we first saw him. And he had lost in a very primal way, not only cognitive empathy, but emotional empathy as well. A couple examples, He lived in a small town and had become intensely religious in the setting of his degenerative disease and spent a lot of time in church. And it was a Sunday morning and the town was experiencing a massive flood. And everyone, including the minister, was out at the river with sandbags protecting the greater whole of that community. Thomas was in the middle of the church, extremely angry because the rules that he was guided by, these are all left hemisphere rules, suggested that everyone should be in church on Sunday.

16:48Thomas also had this seminal moment with his wife where she cut herself with clippers in the garden. and Thomas showed no empathy for her during this period of pain and in fact asked her to be quiet so neighbors wouldn't hear her crying. And rather than thinking about how to help his loved one, Thomas actually took the clippers to the neighbor and said, I want you to use these because I'm not going to be using them for a while. We'll be going to the hospital. So Thomas was a real outlier. He just had unbelievable inability to empathize with other people. And it was a change. This was not who he was before.

17:36He had been a beautiful, wonderful husband and father. And so we systematically looked at him and asked about surprises. This is one of the biggest surprises in my career in research. And what we learned was that the right anterior temporal lobe, which we now think is part of the empathy circuit, was shrunken. It was almost non-existent. And there were similar changes on the left side. So he didn't have severe brain injury in most areas. His brain was pretty normal. But this loss of empathy was very strongly correlated with loss of circuits that we now realize are important for, as Virginia has touched on today, seeing other people's pain, feeling it internally, and then doing something about it, the altruistic part.

18:33And without that circuit, we are devoid of empathy. So I wanted to ask you a follow-on question about that. So it's becoming more and more common, especially with the sports that kids play today, that they experience traumatic brain injuries. Yes. Is it possible for a TBI to cause an injury that could impact a person's sense of empathy? Absolutely. I think one of the general principles of brain trauma, physical brain trauma, is that the parts of the brain that sit against bone are those that are often most vulnerable to a shaking of some kind. So where do the anterior temporal lobe sit? They sit right adjacent to bone.

19:20So I think along with the memory that is localized a little more posterior in that region, a lot of TBI is associated with memory problems, but often more silent, this loss of the ability to empathize with others. It's so interesting. And if someone has experienced that, is there a way to correct that deficiency or is it a permanent type of loss? There are ways that anyone can try to improve empathy by learning to see emotions in someone else's face that are more subtle and learning more details about how to label those experiences or expressions that they notice. changing how someone feels is always more complicated, but engaging in activities and interacting with humans in enjoyable ways are often effective ways to feel positive states and get oneself out of a rut, if that is the case.

20:25I think what you touch on here is the fact that we have all sorts of rehabilitation programs that think about memory, that think about what we call executive function, planning organization, and some fairly effective strategies about how to help when people have suffered from traumatic brain injury. But the area of rehabilitation around empathy, I would say, is sparse. And there's little research and there are very few programs that have focused on this. In our field of frontotemporal dementia, a woman, the scientist, Elizabeth Finger in Canada has tried using oxytocin, this nurturing peptide that is released when a child is born to see whether she can activate empathy.

21:19And I think with some success, actually, her research has suggested that one simple chemical, while not a cure, can have positive effects in people who have lost this critical human value. I just bring it up because for me personally, I've experienced six or seven TBIs and one of them was quite severe when I was in combat. And coming out of that, I know something fundamentally changed for me when it comes to expressing empathy, which is why I've made this such a focus of the conversation. and it's something that like just disappeared and I have really tried to understand how I could get it back and I've tried different vitamins and nutrients and different fruit and different natural forms to try to reignite it and nothing has ever seemed to work.

22:16What you're saying is confirms what I have found in my own research. It seems so unfair that someone who is in an occupation to help others, as you were, suffers an injury that diminishes that ability. But just from our discussion on this podcast, I would say you have plenty of empathy and cognitive empathy, that's for sure. Yeah. Well, I want to now switch to the paradox of Anne's story, who I mentioned earlier, because it's really staggering. In her case, she loses language, but she almost miraculously gains artistry. What does her case reveal about the brain's untapped potential for reinvention?

23:05So when I was growing up, and we still hear it, I would often hear, we need to increase the entire brain's activity if we're going to really have the ultimate outcome. And I think what I learned from Ann, and this is really how the brain works, is that we have very specific circuits in the brain with very specific functions. And if we activate other circuits, when we want that very specific skill, it will actually impair that circuit. So what we learned from Ann was that as she lost language, and in retrospect, probably not a surprise, that circuits in the back of the brain involved with vision and visual processing activated it.

23:56Anne became visually obsessed. Everything in her life was colors and pictures. And she, because Anne was unique with this preoccupation visually, suddenly produced beautiful art. And so it pointed out that, no, we don't necessarily want to activate the whole brain at ones. Rather, we want to turn off certain parts of the brain so that others can really do their magic. And I think this is true of everything, whether it's a sport, whether it's a speaker, whether it's a singer. They need to cultivate the very specific circuit that they use, create something that is special, and they have to turn everything else off.

24:43This leads me to, you both describe creativity as a form of, if I have this correct, compensatory blooming. Is it possible we all have dormant capacities that only emerge under certain neurological conditions?

25:05I think so. I think it's definitely possible that we all have more potential that it's hard for us to access for whatever reasons. That's not to say a disease or disorder is a good way to unleash that ability, but there probably are systems in our brain, like Bruce was describing, that we can't turn off very easily. And in the unfortunate situation, when there is a disease or a head injury or a stroke in those parts of the brain that are suppressing other regions, then it would be possible that people could gain and develop these new kinds of strengths and abilities. So that's possible. We all have hidden talents lurking within us that in the right circumstances, we could release.

25:52This is very true. And I think this is what music teachers and art teachers try to do. And Betty Edwards, the great art educator, said, I have to teach people to draw on the right side of their brain. And she even had formal exercises that they work. I've done them. For a non-artist, these exercises really work. And she said, when I get these very logical left hemisphere dominated people in my class, I want them to turn off that way of thinking. So she takes a picture of Teddy Roosevelt and puts it upside down. Doesn't allow you to think about it in the logical way we usually do about a face. and anyone who hasn't tried it, who's never drawn very well, if you turn Teddy Roosevelt upside down, you do a much better job of drawing him than you did when he was right side up.

26:46When I was younger, I got every possible lesson imaginable to learn how to play piano. And I was blocked. It wasn't the teacher's fault. It was me, something about my brain. but as I've gotten older and almost certainly lost something, my ability to play the piano is much better, much more natural, much more spontaneous. And I think that this is the holy grail for teachers is how do we get people to turn off things that are inhibiting them from doing something really special? And everyone's different, everyone's unique, so there isn't one formula. But this is, I think, more advanced in sports psychology than anywhere else, where people think about how to get someone like Steph Curry in the zone, where there is no conscious thought, then direct from the basal ganglia and cerebellum to the basket in a blink of an eye.

27:47Man, I'll tell you, I have worked for a long time on how to find, I call it the zone of optimal anxiety or flow state is what most people refer to it as. I have really come to find out that you can learn to put yourself there and keep yourself there for a longer period of time. And I started doing this when I was an executive because I saw studies that McKenzie did that if you're in a flow state, you're more productive in two hours than your peers are in eight to 10. And so I just figured if I could get myself in this flow state, I could be hyper-focused and then I could spend more time once I'm out of it, socializing with employees, doing the HR side of things.

28:32That's how I acted during a lot of my career. And now I find myself using it most effectively when I myself am writing a book or trying to do a solo podcast episode that I'm working on or a keynote speech. And it really five minutes goes, it seems to me it's like five minutes and it's four hours later. It's a wonderful state of being. I do a lot of writing and my most effective writing is when I'm on an airplane with my AirPods, listening to my favorite music. And it gets me into a very focused state with a good feeling. And the writing I do there is 10 times more effective than when I'm not there.

29:15Yeah, I think the only person who doesn't like it when I'm in the flow state is my wife, because it's like everything else just fades away when I'm in that concentration state. Yes. So I want to talk to you both about a topic that is really close to my heart, and that is the subject of mattering. Do you see mattering as a biological need, something the brain registers like food or safety? And if so, how do you believe it intersects with the traits of the social brain? We love that question. I'm going to let Virginia say. I love the way you phrased it. That's a really interesting question. Can you say more about what you mean by mattering?

29:57I think I've read a lot about Jeff Cohen's work on belonging, and I think belonging and mattering are related, but they're different. You can get picked for a team if you go back to the school playground and feel like you belong, but that doesn't necessarily make you feel like you matter. Mattering, I think, goes a step beyond that, and it's how your teammates treat you. It's how they recognize you. It's how they make you feel inside. And so I think mattering really has three different dimensions. There's personal mattering, how we feel we matter to the world. There's relational mattering, how we make or how others make us feel we matter.