A short talk explaining that meditation increases kindness and empathy by strengthening neural connections between the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (which processes information about people perceived as separate) and the insula (an empathy-related region). Regular meditation reduces tribal thinking, increases openness to diverse people and ideas, and helps people see others as part of the same team.
Chapters
Do you want to know the secret to effortlessly being a lot more kind? I'm about to tell you. So it's not a secret that meditation makes you more kind. But what a lot of people don't know is why. Why could sitting quietly in a chair possibly make you more empathetic, more open hearted, more joyous? And the answer is that meditation strengthens the connection between your dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, which is just a fancy way of saying the part of your brain that processes information about people who we perceive as separate. So. So I'm a woman, you're a man, I'm white, you're black, I'm straight, you're gay. Someone who we perceive as separate from us. Meditation is going to strengthen that piece of your brain to something called the insula, which is the empathy center. So just by getting your buns in the chair every day, you're going to start to have more empathy for people who we perceive as separate from us. That's why meditators tend to be more peaceful, because we start to see more of ourselves inside of others. Because rather than being in fight or flight, where we're always looking for an enemy and it's hard to fight someone who we think is on our team because we've come from sort of a tribal background, then we start to see the whole species, the whole planet, as on our team, because we stop seeing them as separate. And if we do perceive them as separate, we still have empathy for them. Because meditation is actually rewiring the parts of your brain from the empathy center to the piece that processes information about people that we used to think were separate. So if you have been feeling in conflict with your co workers or mad even at your spouse, or walking down the street and only wanting to be friends with people that look like you and vote like you and talk like you and dress like you, then what if meditation could actually open up your heart and mind to all new types of friends, all new types of idea exchange? Because we are not going to crawl ourselves out of the challenges that we're facing as a species by continuing to insulate ourselves and just be in our own little silos and our own little echo chambers. We have to start to cross pollinate ideas and solutions, and that is going to be a lot easier to do if we have empathy for people who we used to think were separate.
