#107: The Science of Human Connection - Dr. Tania Singer

0:00We're scanning Mathieu and I was asking him to imagine suffering children. and I was expecting to see the pain matrix. But what I saw is this other network, which is usually coming with positive emotion and also reward. And then he explained to me, no, I'm actually 100 % in this compassionate state. But compassion doesn't mean that you have to suffer with. It means that you have this strong motivation for the welfare of these children and you're puering out this unconditional love and warmth and concern. And this is where we understood, oh they are like two totally different networks so I asked him to go back into what we call empathy taking the suffering of these children as if it would be his and when we asked him then to come out he said oh my god I want to do another run of compassion because it is so unbearably stressful and I'm so much in empathic distress that I want to get out of that by basically meditating on compassion and producing this other wholesome positive state again and so we really understood that there were basically two different networks in the brain and that you could switch from empathy to compassion but that compassion was more resilient because it is coming with this positive unconditional accepting and loving feelings now and the motivation and that became the basis of a lot of mental training programs we developed later.

1:27Welcome back to the FitMind podcast where we explore the science of mental fitness and the contemplative practices that help us live with more clarity, compassion and well-being. Today, I'm speaking with Dr. Tanya Singer, one of the world's leading social neuroscientists and a pioneer in research on empathy, compassion and the plasticity of the social brain. Her work has reshaped how we understand human connection from the neural circuits that allow us to feel with others to the very different brain networks involved in compassion and caring motivation. Dr. Singha led the amazing Resource Project, the largest longitudinal study ever conducted on mental training, which revealed that different meditation practices strengthen different mental muscles and that partner-based practices like diets can reduce social stress more than classical mindfulness.

2:20Her research is now helping transform education and healthcare systems across Europe through scalable evidence-based compassion training. This conversation dives into empathy versus compassion, the neuroscience behind stress and resilience, and how interpersonal practices can change the brain, and how all of this ties into a broader vision for a more caring society. I hope you enjoy this deep and inspiring conversation with Dr. Tanya Singer. Dr. Tanya Singer, thank you so much for joining us and welcome to the podcast. Hi, hello. I'd love to go back to how you first got started with the incredible work that you're doing.

3:02So how did your personal experience as an identical twin, I believe you were, how did that shape your interest in the social side of human life and empathy and compassion? Yeah, I think that probably, I don't know why, but because you are born as an identical twin, you are constantly in interaction with a human being and with another being, right, which is already interacting in the womb. know with you so i guess this kind of pre-verbal interaction certainly interested me i guess my whole life in terms of um you know like how how do humans are actually not separated but very interdependent and um and know much more about the other non-verbally and unconsciously about you know what the other feels and think even though we don't always have to speak right And so I guess I co-created the field of social neuroscience at that time.

4:02I was working in developmental psychology and then I switched rather late to the emerging field of social neuroscience to London. And then did the kind of first empathy experiment in neuroscience, you know, in the brain. Because I guess of this interest. And because I felt that at that time, cognitive neuroscience was much too much focused on just, you know, the cognitive function of an individual and not like how do we interact and how, you know, how our, how do we know whatever people feel, think, you know, how do we do that? Yeah, definitely. So you're talking about the social or the subjective experience.

4:43Do you also talk about and measure that as well as the kind of more objective neuroscience perspective? Okay, so I think you are alluding to another topic, which is the topic of first person, third person, second person neuroscience. This is a kind of a topic in contemplative neuroscience, which is another field I entered later. And this is where we try to combine both the subjective perspective of a person, like, you know, I'm feeling or I have conscious thoughts or perceptions. and the measuring of an object or the brain or whatever is the third person perspective. And the second person perspective would be the emergence of an interaction between two brains, right?

5:27And so social neuroscience is particularly interested, obviously, in the second person. And I have also lately worked on mental training formats like diets, which tap into the second person perspective rather than just the first person. But that's, yeah, another question. Could you please describe your landmark study on empathy for pain and what it revealed about the difference between the physical and emotional aspects of pain? Yeah, so that was the first attempt, right, to put empathy research into the picture of imaging neuroscience, like of non-invasive, you know, scanning of brains of humans.

6:09and so we invited couples to come in and so the the wife of a couple would lie in the scanner and the husband would be next to the scanner which was the first time that we would basically ask someone to sit next to the scanner because you're not allowed to move because of all the movement artifacts in the pictures of the brain of the person who lies in the scanner so it was quite risky and we had a like a mirror system so that um the the wife in in the scanner would get little painful stimulation to the hand which is like a bee sting but without consequence and so you could measure what is called the pain matrix in the brain of the person who was scanned and then um with the arrows you could see in the scanner it's not a very social environment you could see whether the partner gets painful stimulation.

7:06And that was the empathy condition. Obviously, the person in the scanner didn't felt anything. But if you are empathizing, resonating with the pain of the other, suffering with the other, you should see something in the brain. And what we saw is that parts of the pain matrix, which is processing my own pain when I really receive painful nociceptive stimuli, is actually activated also if you watch another or you know that your partner is now receiving pain and suffering. What is it in the brain that is lighting up as that happens? What areas of the brain do we feel as we see someone else suffer?

7:45So it's important to basically distinguish there is not such a thing like a pain area. It always depends which emotion I'm empathizing with, right? If I'm empathizing with joy, I have other areas and networks lighting up because these are the areas which represent my own positive feelings and joy. If I'm suffering for pain now, very particular for this experiment, I have the affective networks of the pain network, which is the anterior insular, the MACC, lighting up particularly because they are coding and representing the ouch, the aversiveness of this experience of pain, the emotional component.

8:26And how does that differ to you? You highlight the difference between compassion and how does that differ when we bring in compassion? How is it you define compassion and how does that look different in those experiments? so that was work i did later actually this was the empathy experiments and then we understood more and more how these empathic brain circuitry for the suffering of other are modulated by different factors and so the next question i wanted to ask is can we train empathy can we make people more empathic and this is throughout you know exploring this question where i discovered that actually the networks for empathy, which is defined as feeling with, so it's emotional resonance.

9:17It's like if you are in pain, I feel your pain. If you are happy, I'm feeling happy with you. But it's important. Empathy is also I feel your pain, but I know that the source is yours. It's not my emotion. So I'm aware that I'm vicariously sharing an emotion with you, which is not mine. So there is a conscious self, other distinction and empathy as well. But compassion is, as we discovered later, also experiments with Buddhist monks and, you know, expert meditate or meditating on compassion, is that compassion is rather relying on a motivational care and affiliation system, a very old evolution system, actually, which comes more with warmth and love and concern for the other.

10:04So as Batson said, it's not feeling with, it's feeling for. It's kind of a, it's not a fleeting emotion coming and going like an empathy, but it is more like an underlying motivation to want the happiness and welfare of someone else, right? This is like a mother or father would care unconditionally for the children they have, no? They would, you know, throw themselves under a car if the child is in danger, or most parents would do. And that comes out of this kiana, an altruistic system, which is also the basis for compassion. You had some amazing stories. You had the pleasure of studying Mathieu Ricard.

10:48And what was that like? And what did you find when studying Mathieu and the other Buddhist monks? So, yeah, that was the beginning of this plasticity research where we discovered the empathy-compassion distinction. Because we were scanning Mathieu and I was asking him to imagine, you know, like videos of suffering children. And I was expecting to see the pain matrix, the kind of, you know, this affective, empathic pain matrix I was talking about just a minute ago. But what I saw is this other network, this kind of affiliative care, which is usually coming with positive emotion and also reward.

11:31And so I wasn't understanding what he was doing because I asked him to imagine these videos of these orphanage suffering children. And then I saw these kind of reward networks lighting up. So I asked him, are you not really suffering with them? And are you thinking about your, you know, like what you will eat in lunch, like, you know, cakes? Because that is what we saw in the brain. and then he explained me now I'm actually 100 % in this compassionate state but compassion doesn't mean that you have to suffer with it means that you have this strong motivation for the welfare of these children and you're peering out this unconditional love and and warmth and concern and this is where we understood oh they are like two totally different networks so I asked him to go back into what we call empathy or what we define as empathy and just like taking the suffering of these children as if it would be his and so he went back to the scanner did only that and the empathy as we define it as an emotional sharing and then we could see also in his brain this other network which we have seen in hundreds of participants by then this kind of empathy for pain network lighting up very strongly and when we asked him then to come out he said oh my god i want to do another one of compassion because it is so unbearably stressful and i'm so much in empathic distress that i want to to get out of that by basically meditating on compassion and producing this other wholesome positive state again and so then we let him do these blocks of compassion again and then you could see how this other care and affiliative network came up again and so we we we really understood that there were basically two different networks in the brain and that you could switch from empathy to compassion but that compassion was more resilient because it is coming with this positive you know um unconditional accepting and loving feelings and the motivation to help, the altruistic motivation.

13:45And that became the basis of a lot of mental training programs we developed later. But for people who, not for like Buddhist monks, but like for naive people who had never ever done such practices. So we developed a lot of secular practices out of that. Could you talk a little bit about that? I'd love to know, yeah, how do people, what's the best way for people to get into to those courses that you developed. So you ask about the resource project and what this kind of project was about so the resource project was a nine months it was the first mental training study one year long nine months and there were like three modules of three months different mental practice right meditation contemplative practices the first was called presence and this was like a mindfulness-based more attention focusing module right with classical mindfulness exercise where you stabilize your mind by focusing either on the breath or on sounds or on something you smell or see and then we had an affective module socio-affective model and that was in this module you did a lot of practices which would open your heart and activate this care and affiliative system, which we have seen with Mathieu Ricard.

15:06So through compassion, through gratitude, through acceptance, were all kind of these beneficial social positive emotions. And then there was a third module which was called Perspective, and this was a metacognitive, sociocognitive module. and this was really teaching people to take a cognitive perspective of others but also of aspects of themselves. And so we could compare these three modules with each other and we had more than 90 different scientific measures from brain measures to hormonal measures to behavior measures to all kinds of things. And so we could really see, we have like more than 70 papers, peer-reviewed scientific papers out of this big study and we could see that really it depends on what you practice right it matters what you practice depending on whether you do three months of attention mental exercises you will or like mindfulness exercise you will of course boost attention interoceptive body awareness presence but you will not boost necessarily you know compassion altruism donations this is only really boosted if you do the three months of this care-based affect module right with all these heart opening exercise so and then also your social cognition social intelligence perspective taking only gets boosted in the third module when you really practice every day exercises which in a way train these networks in your brain which are different networks so it is very specific and i think we should stop you know talking about just meditation or mindfulness or so as general terms because it's a bit like in sport yeah it depends on on which machine you go in a fitness club and that will you know like either you know train your muscles here or your feet muscles or your calf muscle and it's very similar in the brain we don't have muscles in the brain, but the networks in the brain can show plasticity, meaning that the gray matter gets thicker, like they really get thicker, and we could prove that.

17:22But which network will get thicker depends on what you practice every day, 30 minutes, like in the resource project. And that is what we could also show. And so after this resource project, a lot of people ask, oh, can we bring that in hospital and education into the society? because it's a science-based, very efficient way, you know, of boosting your mental health, resilience, social skills. And we didn't have a really low-dose, scalable version because nine months and big retreats and live retreats. And then came the pandemic and the pandemic forced us to stay at home. So we started developing online mental training programs and just because we were forced.

18:06And so, but the benefit out of this is that we could prove that using especially a certain form of 13 minutes partner-based dyadic exercise was especially efficient to boost all this resilience and empathy, compassion and these altruistic social components. And so we continued, you know, to develop more and more of these dyadic-based, like partner-based exercise, eight-week, ten-week online programs, so that we could implement and scale them into society. I hope you're enjoying this amazing episode with Dr. Tanya Singer. I just wanted to take a moment of your time to let you know that we just recently released a free module called Combat Training, which is on the app now.

18:54I recently spent a little bit of time on retreat with our founder, Liam, in Malaysia, in the middle of a river, doing this practice. and I can say it had absolutely profound effects on my default and the way that I felt as I was moving through everyday life. We also still have the incredible course, 30 Days of Meditation, Science and Bliss, which is much closer to the type of compassion training that we're talking about in this episode. As always, this new course and this podcast are brought to you free by the kindness of our founder and the Fitmind team. If you are in a position to help us financially, please do look at giving us a donation.

19:27And if not, there's absolutely no worries to. Your support by watching is all that we want. Our goal is really just to bring about a mental revolution. If you could also like and subscribe, hit the bell notification and drop a comment, that helps massively too. Thank you so much. Enjoy the rest of the episode. I found it particularly interesting. I had done a little bit of group therapy recently and like initially, not that it's necessarily directly comparable, but I considered like a one-on-one with a therapist versus two people. you might be splitting your time but I think it really touches on the kind of like the interconnectedness that these heart-based practices help to like flourish and increase could you talk a little bit more about the diet practices and how you found or what you found in that research yeah so because you know I was of course there were all these mindfulness exercise around but the thing is that you do them alone right you just close your eyes and then you train either attention-based focus or whatever uh and because i was a social neuroscientist interested in social emotion like empathy you need another one right compassion you need another one another one to take the perspective of the other so i had come across through the satori process which i did privately as a just as a retreat in australia actually um and so there i was this kind of partner base like where you sit it's like a meditation but done together and one is listening empathically or like without judgment but doesn't interrupt and is also not allowed to comment or to say anything it's really just focused present listening and the other answers specific questions so that you can it's like a loud reflection onto this question and so I use this format of two people exercise in the resource project with the question of whether we could not use this interpersonal mental training or interpersonal mindfulness practices, secular one, to really do a skill learning approach to boost empathy, compassion.

21:37And so we develop programs where you do this dyadic, partner-based, not just once in a retreat or so, but you do it daily in your daily life, like after a kickoff or onboarding or after like a you know a first introduction into the method into the do's and don'ts you know creating a psychologically safe space and all that you start by telephone or by app depending in in the research we have an app in the in the you know when I do that outside of my research just to give courses and programs for people we do it by telephone and you do every day a 30 minutes diet and so after about six minutes you change roles so first I had I'm asked to question to reflect on it and then we switch role and then you are asked the same question to reflect on them and you do that eight weeks or 10 weeks every day and then you have also online coaching session to deepen the practice and to also you know be able to ask questions and in these coaching sessions every week you also meet your new partner because you are changing partner every week and this changing of practice partner every week is very important because we are training implicitly through that something what we call shared humanity or common humanity like tolerance it's like kind of peace work right because you are looking into the lives, listening to different people every week.

23:05And so you become more tolerant towards different perspectives, different lives, different people, different characters. And so that's a very heart-opening and very peace-building work because it also creates a field of social cohesion and connection, social connection. Yeah, it really does. and I think it could not be more important that you're doing this kind of work right now. And it's such a relief to hear. I did one of my first courses on, I think, the four immeasurables like 10 years ago, and it was before I read the findings of compassion or loving kindness-based training and how quickly that can change the default mode network.

23:56So, yeah, I just think it's so important and incredible that you're doing this research. I remember one of the most surprising findings was that it was only, I think, social training, not the attention-based practices that was reducing the body's cortisol levels as well. Could you talk a little bit about the implications of that? yeah that is something we observed the first time in in the resource project where we didn't ask only like to to measure you know stress by questionnaire like do you feel less stress or so on but we really measured the the cortisol in the blood after a social stressor right they had to do a task a social stressor task which is called TRIA social stress test you have to give a talk in front of people who are not very friendly to you and white coats and not really socially supportive.

24:51And so this is very stressful because you feel like, do I do something wrong? Is something wrong with me? You know, these kind of social stressor thoughts. And then you can measure this cortisol goes up. And what we could find is that after three months of these practices of the module, the presence module where you did this mindfulness practice alone, this attention-based basic practices, we couldn't reduce cortisol social stress at all. But in the modules, the affective and perspective modules, where we had introduced this novel social dyadic partner-based exercise every day, we could reduce cortisol up to 51%.

25:39so we have replicated this because at that time we didn't know is it really just the diet because these were it's only observable in the social modules where you had also the diets but we also had like what you said like meta practice loving kindness in affect module so we didn't know is it the mix or so in the cough social we directly compared classic mindfulness practice with just a diet so in this low dose online program we did during the covid pandemic we we compared what is the effect just doing 30 minutes an effective diet with a group which would do you know classic mindfulness meditation also just 30 minutes but alone and where we and here we could replicate that only the dyadic practice could lower the cortisol level uh when when exposed to social stressors.

26:36So that kind of really confirmed that the diets are just very more efficient, which makes sense because it's an interpersonal practice. And the cause of social stress, I'm not talking of stress in general, stress has a lot of causes. There are different types of stress, right? You can be stressed because of infection, because of hunger or like cold. I'm talking about social stress meaning the stress which is affecting most of our industrial countries is we are not good enough we're feeling judged we're feeling you know not up to the task or whatever to think to whatever not enough beautiful and so that is that's just like this kind of social trigger stress so obviously you can heal the causes better when you have a social situation.

27:29and not a situation where you are alone. So that makes a lot of sense. And during the diet, you're learning to actually expose vulnerable emotion every day. You are sharing what was difficult during the day and how did it feel in your body to be angry or stressed. And the other is listening non-judgmentally. And then you reverse role. So then you will also not try to judge because you don't want to be judged if it's your turn. So this kind of type of exercise buffers you, I think, more and more. The more you do these exercises to the, you know, to the fear of being judged because you feel more and more, oh, everyone is same, right?

28:07Everyone has fears. Everyone has anxieties. So I don't have to fear all the time that I'm not enough and that I'm different. And so this is probably the reason why the stress, the social stress goes down so incredibly well. how are you or how do we get it into like more more schools and healthcare systems and it's a study we just start doing because after we had published these findings with cough social so after we had published these findings we knew oh okay we have an online version we have a low dose program which still works which still reduces depression which would use anxiety which boost resilience which boost optimism and social connection and reduce loneliness so so then we said okay the next step needs to be to to take these evidence science-based dyadic programs and bring them into the fields in society where the where the you know burnout rates and depression are the highest no and that is education and mental health at the moment right Like mental health providers in hospital, especially during the pandemic and afterward, are really suffering huge amounts of burnout, exhaustion and so on.

29:25And the teachers as well. And at the same time, these two professions need a lot of social competency, right? They need to treat and to be a good listener to the patients or to the children or treat them with compassion and not like stress. So in a way, social skill learning is very, very fundamental for both positions. So we created the EduSocial project and there is an EduSocial school project, EduSocial health care project. So one is teaching basically to hundreds of teachers in Germany these skills, these like dyadic program, eight week or 10 week program. And now I'm in Salzburg right now because we're starting to implement the possible, it's not yet totally signed everything, but we are discussing with the medical faculty here of a medical university here in Austria to actually provide this intervention program to all the students, all the medical students from human medicine to nursing to pharmacy to everything, to also do the dietic daily practice with the Zoom calls because this would not only allow to boost their resilience and to teach them how to do healthy listening and how to avoid empathic distress, how to go into compassion and how to really self-regulate stress, but it also provides social cohesion and more interprofessional understanding because typically the nursing students have never anything to do with the human medical, we call them the God-revised data.

31:10And we are trying through the social cohesion of this program also to get to a deeper tolerance and understanding for each other's roles and domains. But this has not started yet. We have first results with the teachers. We did a first pilot study last year with 120 teachers in Germany, and it was very difficult to recruit them, more difficult than all these studies I did before, because they are so close to burnout and over that it's for them first. First reaction is not yet another thing. Right. But once they practice diets every day after one or two weeks, they get really addicted to it. And I think 60 % of the sample after the 10 weeks wanted to continue voluntarily.

32:01So we said, look, we just follow. We just make like a community so that they could continue practice their diets every day. And we help pairing them every week. And they can stay on our app, right? So that we get also longitudinal data about these mental health programs, not just eight weeks and then it's finished. but like what happens when people continue over months over years i i also um you know providing already since five or six years i'm always giving workshops or two months of these diet courses just next to my work privately and this is without research it's just so that people can learn these techniques and and profit from it and and there i have the experience sometimes when I give masterclass like this is like intensive retreat and then two months online from home daily diet there is sometimes 70-80 % which continues after the courses right and so we we have like a community of more than 100 people who do diets every day and they and they do it sometimes over years right the first masterclass I gave them I think six years ago also in France for healthcare provided during the pandemic.

33:16And they just continue doing it because it just is, it's like a mental hygiene, right? It's like a mental thing you do every day. It's like your me time for yourself. So yeah, so this work is really a bit, it's like kind of a magic format which really helps transform people in a, yeah, deep way. Yeah, gosh, that's incredible. And I think I will sign up at some point in the nephew for your future for one because it sounds amazing. And I think the dyad aspect is just particularly interesting. And yeah, I'm extremely curious how that would be. So we'll move into the kind of broader vision of societal transformation as we start to wrap it up.

34:02So your research on brains plasticity, How could that kind of challenge the economic models of today and hopefully support a movement into a kind of more caring economics? Yeah, so the topic of caring economics is somehow another stream which came about much earlier of research because I found myself to be a professor in an economy department because I was part in Zurich for four or five years of an interdisciplinary networks where we were all working on, you know, the conditions for cooperation to emerge or to collapse, right? and what are the conditions to flourish, you know, cooperation to flourish or to collapse.

34:49And so we were working a lot with economists and we were all associated to the economy department of the University of Zurich because Ernst Fehr had brought about this interdisciplinary research network. And so I learned a lot about economics and homoeconomic and the assumption which, you know, our economic models are still relying on, the kind of neoclassicistic model of economics. And as a psychologist in social neuroscience, I was a bit shocked to see that all these axiomatic they had were absolutely not in line at all with what we know in psychology or from biology, right? So whatever like fixed preferences and context insensitive, endogenously given, we have many, many experimental proofs since the 70s, basically.

35:36Also in just behavioral psychology, but also in biology. But this is just not true, right? That's just not how we are. Humans have a lot of different motivation systems, not just one fixed preference. And, you know, depending in which context and in which, you know, how we are, this motivation system can be more active or less. So we can be more caring and more in affiliation and care system, which is the basis for compassion, as I said before. Or we can be more, you know, consumption driven, which is the only utility economists really know. And or we can be, you know, power driven, status driven.

36:16We can be driven by, you know, achievement. So these are all different motivation systems by threat, by fear, by anxiety. And depending which of these motivational evolutionary very old system is more active, you will show very different behaviors. right if you are in care and affiliation you show more post-social more trusting behaviors more donations more um you know other related altruistic behaviors but when you are in achievement you show excelling behaviors and if you are under threat you know when the alarm system is active you are either you know flee fight flight freeze right you have totally so it there is not just like one utility function where, you know, people are consumption-oriented and egoistic.

37:05It is true if you search for food or, you know, consuming something, you are rather egoistic. It's like me having, wanting, craving. But this is just one of many, many motivation systems. And depending in which, you know, context we are, the different motivation systems are more adaptive or not, right? So what we analyzed at that time is that we need new economic model, a new basically backbone of how we think, like new economic thinking as well, more influenced by real psychology and biology and how we are as humans. And so we started developing those. And this is why it was called caring economics, because the assumption was if we want to get our systems, we balance more to other focused relationship, more through think balance, less stress, less anxiety, less addiction, right?

37:58Less, more, more, more, more, more, which can lead to addiction and a lot of, you know, imbalance also in terms of health. We would need to look for institutional design environments which allow that you can work more out of your care system, right? Because most of our system we have created, whether it's healthcare system or scientific system or financial systems or educational system, are mostly relying on achievement, consumption, power, right? On this motivation, they are like fostering that a lot. And that is very difficult for us working in this system with these contracts, with these incentives to actually live in care and affiliation.

38:44so we we live in care and affiliation privately at home with our spouses or partners in friendship work and that obviously given that we work a lot is out of balance so that that is the you know the assumption of caring economics to rebalance our system so that we can have a balance between all the motivation system it's not about one is better than the other but just adaptive balance And yeah, so that is the bigger picture in terms of how inner change can motivate social change, right? And system change. I mean, that's an incredible vision. I hope that it is successful and in any way we can help you.