The search for empathy

As a psychiatric nurse practitioner, I have been fascinated by new brain imaging studies that provide hard-core data about how our brains react to addiction and trauma. We now know that the brains of people with PTSD react in the same exact way when they are retriggered by an event as on the first day the trauma happened—the brain recognizes no passage of time. People growing up in chaotic, unstable, violent conditions literally develop different brains and brain tracts from those who develop under nurturing, peaceful, stable tutoring.

A new article in National Geographic reviews data of brain scans based on displays on empathy in average people who go above and beyond in helping others at a moment’s notice—like the guys on the commuter train who helped a young girl in a hijab who was being harassed or the single mother who ran to save a wheelchair-bound man stuck on the railroad tracks as a train approached. The brains of these people literally signal more in their emotional limbic system. Somewhere along the way, they developed a greater brain ability to empathize.

Combine this with the social science experiments of the 1960s-’70s regarding people’s behaviors with perceived authority figures or being in positions of power over others, like the electric current administration experiments of Stanley Milgram, and you have a new scientific way for addressing the current administration in power as well as its base.

My question for the wealthy and their base is: Why would you engage in behaviors that destroy the planet and leave your own children a legacy of death and destruction? My hypothesis is that showing the elite, white men of the Grand Old Party images of wealth and power will result in their brain scans lighting up in the same way as showing an addicted, homeless person crack and a pipe. Both are hoarders of their drug. Both engage in destructive, illogical behaviors that sacrifice others for their next fix.

In the future, when I go to choose my representatives, I won’t ask for their tax returns. I will instead ask to see their brain scans. I want to choose my representatives on their documented brain ability to find humanitarian, life-enhancing solutions to problems in this world.