0:00:01.000,0:00:05.000
You know, I'm struck by how one of the implicit themes of TED

0:00:05.000,0:00:08.000
is compassion, these very moving demonstrations we've just seen:

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HIV in Africa, President Clinton last night.

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And I'd like to do a little collateral thinking, if you will,

0:00:18.000,0:00:23.000
about compassion and bring it from the global level to the personal.

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I'm a psychologist, but rest assured,

0:00:25.000,0:00:26.000
I will not bring it to the scrotal.

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(Laughter)

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There was a very important study done a while ago

0:00:34.000,0:00:38.000
at Princeton Theological Seminary that speaks to why it is

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that when all of us have so many opportunities to help,

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we do sometimes, and we don't other times.

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A group of divinity students at the Princeton Theological Seminary

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were told that they were going to give a practice sermon

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and they were each given a sermon topic.

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Half of those students were given, as a topic,

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the parable of the Good Samaritan:

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the man who stopped the stranger in --

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to help the stranger in need by the side of the road.

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Half were given random Bible topics.

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Then one by one, they were told they had to go to another building

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and give their sermon.

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As they went from the first building to the second,

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each of them passed a man who was bent over and moaning,

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clearly in need. The question is: Did they stop to help?

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The more interesting question is:

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Did it matter they were contemplating the parable

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of the Good Samaritan? Answer: No, not at all.

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What turned out to determine whether someone would stop

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and help a stranger in need

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was how much of a hurry they thought they were in --

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were they feeling they were late, or were they absorbed

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in what they were going to talk about.

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And this is, I think, the predicament of our lives:

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that we don't take every opportunity to help

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because our focus is in the wrong direction.

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There's a new field in brain science, social neuroscience.

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This studies the circuitry in two people's brains

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that activates while they interact.

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And the new thinking about compassion from social neuroscience

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is that our default wiring is to help.

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That is to say, if we attend to the other person,

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we automatically empathize, we automatically feel with them.

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There are these newly identified neurons, mirror neurons,

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that act like a neuro Wi-Fi, activating in our brain

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exactly the areas activated in theirs. We feel "with" automatically.

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And if that person is in need, if that person is suffering,

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we're automatically prepared to help. At least that's the argument.

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But then the question is: Why don't we?

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And I think this speaks to a spectrum

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that goes from complete self-absorption,

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to noticing, to empathy and to compassion.

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And the simple fact is, if we are focused on ourselves,

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if we're preoccupied, as we so often are throughout the day,

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we don't really fully notice the other.

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And this difference between the self and the other focus

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can be very subtle.

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I was doing my taxes the other day, and I got to the point

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where I was listing all of the donations I gave,

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and I had an epiphany, it was -- I came to my check

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to the Seva Foundation and I noticed that I thought,

0:03:24.000,0:03:26.000
boy, my friend Larry Brilliant would really be happy

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that I gave money to Seva.

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Then I realized that what I was getting from giving

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was a narcissistic hit -- that I felt good about myself.

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Then I started to think about the people in the Himalayas

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whose cataracts would be helped, and I realized

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that I went from this kind of narcissistic self-focus

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to altruistic joy, to feeling good

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for the people that were being helped. I think that's a motivator.

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But this distinction between focusing on ourselves

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and focusing on others

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is one that I encourage us all to pay attention to.

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You can see it at a gross level in the world of dating.

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I was at a sushi restaurant a while back

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and I overheard two women talking about the brother of one woman,

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who was in the singles scene. And this woman says,

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"My brother is having trouble getting dates,

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so he's trying speed dating." I don't know if you know speed dating?

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Women sit at tables and men go from table to table,

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and there's a clock and a bell, and at five minutes, bingo,

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the conversation ends and the woman can decide

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whether to give her card or her email address to the man

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for follow up. And this woman says,

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"My brother's never gotten a card, and I know exactly why.

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The moment he sits down, he starts talking non-stop about himself;

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he never asks about the woman."

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And I was doing some research in the Sunday Styles section

0:04:51.000,0:04:54.000
of The New York Times, looking at the back stories of marriages --

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because they're very interesting -- and I came to the marriage

0:04:57.000,0:05:00.000
of Alice Charney Epstein. And she said

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that when she was in the dating scene,

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she had a simple test she put people to.

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The test was: from the moment they got together,

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how long it would take the guy to ask her a question

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with the word "you" in it.

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And apparently Epstein aced the test, therefore the article.

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(Laughter)

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Now this is a -- it's a little test

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I encourage you to try out at a party.

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Here at TED there are great opportunities.

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The Harvard Business Review recently had an article called

0:05:29.000,0:05:32.000
"The Human Moment," about how to make real contact

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with a person at work. And they said, well,

0:05:35.000,0:05:38.000
the fundamental thing you have to do is turn off your BlackBerry,

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close your laptop, end your daydream

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and pay full attention to the person.

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There is a newly coined word in the English language

0:05:51.000,0:05:54.000
for the moment when the person we're with whips out their BlackBerry

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or answers that cell phone, and all of a sudden we don't exist.

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The word is "pizzled": it's a combination of puzzled and pissed off.

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(Laughter)

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I think it's quite apt. It's our empathy, it's our tuning in

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which separates us from Machiavellians or sociopaths.

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I have a brother-in-law who's an expert on horror and terror --

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he wrote the Annotated Dracula, the Essential Frankenstein --

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he was trained as a Chaucer scholar,

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but he was born in Transylvania

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and I think it affected him a little bit.

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At any rate, at one point my brother-in-law, Leonard,

0:06:32.000,0:06:34.000
decided to write a book about a serial killer.

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This is a man who terrorized the very vicinity we're in

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many years ago. He was known as the Santa Cruz strangler.

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And before he was arrested, he had murdered his grandparents,

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his mother and five co-eds at UC Santa Cruz.

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So my brother-in-law goes to interview this killer

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and he realizes when he meets him

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that this guy is absolutely terrifying.

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For one thing, he's almost seven feet tall.

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But that's not the most terrifying thing about him.

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The scariest thing is that his IQ is 160: a certified genius.

0:07:07.000,0:07:11.000
But there is zero correlation between IQ and emotional empathy,

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feeling with the other person.

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They're controlled by different parts of the brain.

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So at one point, my brother-in-law gets up the courage

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to ask the one question he really wants to know the answer to,

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and that is: how could you have done it?

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Didn't you feel any pity for your victims?

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These were very intimate murders -- he strangled his victims.

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And the strangler says very matter-of-factly,

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"Oh no. If I'd felt the distress, I could not have done it.

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I had to turn that part of me off. I had to turn that part of me off."

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And I think that that is very troubling,

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and in a sense, I've been reflecting on turning that part of us off.

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When we focus on ourselves in any activity,

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we do turn that part of ourselves off if there's another person.

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Think about going shopping and think about the possibilities

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of a compassionate consumerism.

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Right now, as Bill McDonough has pointed out,

0:08:12.000,0:08:16.000
the objects that we buy and use have hidden consequences.

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We're all unwitting victims of a collective blind spot.

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We don't notice and don't notice that we don't notice

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the toxic molecules emitted by a carpet or by the fabric on the seats.

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Or we don't know if that fabric is a technological

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or manufacturing nutrient; it can be reused

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or does it just end up at landfill? In other words,

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we're oblivious to the ecological and public health

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and social and economic justice consequences

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of the things we buy and use.

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In a sense, the room itself is the elephant in the room,

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but we don't see it. And we've become victims

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of a system that points us elsewhere. Consider this.

0:09:06.000,0:09:09.000
There's a wonderful book called

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Stuff: The Hidden Life of Everyday Objects.

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And it talks about the back story of something like a t-shirt.

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And it talks about where the cotton was grown

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and the fertilizers that were used and the consequences

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for soil of that fertilizer. And it mentions, for instance,

0:09:25.000,0:09:28.000
that cotton is very resistant to textile dye;

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about 60 percent washes off into wastewater.

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And it's well known by epidemiologists that kids

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who live near textile works tend to have high rates of leukemia.

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There's a company, Bennett and Company, that supplies Polo.com,

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Victoria's Secret -- they, because of their CEO, who's aware of this,

0:09:51.000,0:09:55.000
in China formed a joint venture with their dye works

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to make sure that the wastewater

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would be properly taken care of before it returned to the groundwater.

0:10:01.000,0:10:05.000
Right now, we don't have the option to choose the virtuous t-shirt

0:10:06.000,0:10:10.000
over the non-virtuous one. So what would it take to do that?

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Well, I've been thinking. For one thing,

0:10:16.000,0:10:21.000
there's a new electronic tagging technology that allows any store

0:10:21.000,0:10:25.000
to know the entire history of any item on the shelves in that store.

0:10:26.000,0:10:28.000
You can track it back to the factory. Once you can track it

0:10:28.000,0:10:32.000
back to the factory, you can look at the manufacturing processes

0:10:32.000,0:10:36.000
that were used to make it, and if it's virtuous,

0:10:36.000,0:10:40.000
you can label it that way. Or if it's not so virtuous,

0:10:40.000,0:10:44.000
you can go into -- today, go into any store,

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put your scanner on a palm onto a barcode,

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which will take you to a website.

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They have it for people with allergies to peanuts.

0:10:52.000,0:10:54.000
That website could tell you things about that object.

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In other words, at point of purchase,

0:10:56.000,0:11:00.000
we might be able to make a compassionate choice.

0:11:00.000,0:11:06.000
There's a saying in the world of information science:

0:11:06.000,0:11:09.000
ultimately everybody will know everything.

0:11:09.000,0:11:11.000
And the question is: will it make a difference?

0:11:13.000,0:11:16.000
Some time ago when I was working for The New York Times,

0:11:17.000,0:11:19.000
it was in the '80s, I did an article

0:11:19.000,0:11:21.000
on what was then a new problem in New York --

0:11:21.000,0:11:23.000
it was homeless people on the streets.

0:11:23.000,0:11:27.000
And I spent a couple of weeks going around with a social work agency

0:11:27.000,0:11:30.000
that ministered to the homeless. And I realized seeing the homeless

0:11:30.000,0:11:35.000
through their eyes that almost all of them were psychiatric patients

0:11:35.000,0:11:39.000
that had nowhere to go. They had a diagnosis. It made me --

0:11:40.000,0:11:43.000
what it did was to shake me out of the urban trance where,

0:11:44.000,0:11:47.000
when we see, when we're passing someone who's homeless

0:11:47.000,0:11:50.000
in the periphery of our vision, it stays on the periphery.

0:11:52.000,0:11:54.000
We don't notice and therefore we don't act.

0:11:57.000,0:12:02.000
One day soon after that -- it was a Friday -- at the end of the day,

0:12:02.000,0:12:05.000
I went down -- I was going down to the subway. It was rush hour

0:12:05.000,0:12:07.000
and thousands of people were streaming down the stairs.

0:12:07.000,0:12:09.000
And all of a sudden as I was going down the stairs

0:12:09.000,0:12:12.000
I noticed that there was a man slumped to the side,

0:12:12.000,0:12:16.000
shirtless, not moving, and people were just stepping over him --

0:12:17.000,0:12:18.000
hundreds and hundreds of people.

0:12:19.000,0:12:22.000
And because my urban trance had been somehow weakened,

0:12:23.000,0:12:26.000
I found myself stopping to find out what was wrong.

0:12:27.000,0:12:29.000
The moment I stopped, half a dozen other people

0:12:30.000,0:12:31.000
immediately ringed the same guy.

0:12:32.000,0:12:34.000
And we found out that he was Hispanic, he didn't speak any English,

0:12:34.000,0:12:39.000
he had no money, he'd been wandering the streets for days, starving,

0:12:39.000,0:12:40.000
and he'd fainted from hunger.

0:12:40.000,0:12:42.000
Immediately someone went to get orange juice,

0:12:42.000,0:12:44.000
someone brought a hotdog, someone brought a subway cop.

0:12:45.000,0:12:48.000
This guy was back on his feet immediately.

0:12:48.000,0:12:52.000
But all it took was that simple act of noticing,

0:12:53.000,0:12:54.000
and so I'm optimistic.

0:12:54.000,0:12:55.000
Thank you very much.

0:12:55.000,0:12:57.000
(Applause)