Quantum Spirit: Brain Shows Complex Reaction to Social Pain

Sunday, April 19, 2009

Brain Shows Complex Reaction to Social Pain

We react quicker to seeing someone else’s physical pain than to their psychological or social pain, but witnessing psychological or social pain leaves a longer-lasting impression.

Brain-imaging research at the University of Southern California showed that, while we react immediately to seeing someone getting phsycially hurt, our brains take 6 to 8 seconds to respond to stories about social or psychological pain. However, our response to social or psychological situations lingers for much longer than the response to physical pain.

Researchers say the slower reaction time suggests a more complex thought process, compared to the instinctive evolutionary reaction to physical pain.

Compassion for another person's social or psychological pain also activated some of the same brain areas triggered by compassion for physical pain, and particularly the region responsible for gut feelings, known as the anterior insula. "That area has been implicated before in all sorts of studies about emotion, empathy and disgust," said Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Southern California.

Click here for the LiveScience article.

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Quotations to Ponder

"If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, 'Thank you,' that would suffice."

~ Meister Eckhart, 14th-century mystic

"Death is not extinguishing the light ~ it is only putting out the lamp because the dawn has come."

~ Rabindranath Tagore

"There shall be signs in the Sun, and in the Moon, and in the Stars."

~ Gospel of Luke, 21:25

"The wind blows where it wills, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know whence it comes or whither it goes; so it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit."
~ Gospel of John, 3:8

"We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience."

~ Teilhard de Chardin

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science."

~ Albert Einstein

"Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to take away."

~Antoine de Saint-Exupery

"The greatest revolution of our generation is the discovery that human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives."

~ William James

"When one door of happiness closes, another opens. But often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one that has been opened for us."

~ Helen Keller

"There are only two ways to live your life ~ as though nothing is a miracle, or as though everything is a miracle."

~ Albert Einstein

"He who's not busy being born

Is busy dying."

~ Bob Dylan

"A mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven."

~ John Milton

17th-century English poet

"This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness."

~ The Dalai Lama

"The intuitive mind is a sacred gift, and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift."
~ Albert Einstein

Attributions

I Ching commentaries on my blog are from the classic The I Ching or Book of Changes, translated by Richard Wilhelm with a Forward by Carl Jung, Princeton University Press, 1950. By the way, when selecting entries for my blog, I don't "throw" anything to discover the hexagram - I simply open the book at random and see what's there.

Selections from the Tao Te Ching are from Stephen Mitchell's translation.

Aesop's fables on my blogs are from Aesop's Fables, translated by Laura Gibbs, Oxford University Press, 2002.

Biblical selections are from The Holy Bible, New King James Version of both the Old and New Testament.