Speaker 1: Could you ever know what it's like to be someone else?
Speaker 1: What does this have to do with bats? Or empathy
Speaker 1: or bomb robots or Helen Keller or literature or when
Speaker 1: someone says I know exactly how you feel. Welcome to
Speaker 1: inner cosmos with me, David Eagelman. I'm a neuroscientist and
Speaker 1: an author at Stanford and in these episodes we sail
Speaker 1: deeply into our three pound universe to understand why and
Speaker 1: how our lives look the way they do. Today's episode
Speaker 1: is about the question of whether we can ever really
Speaker 1: know what it's like to be someone else? Why are
Speaker 1: we all so different? And is it possible that those
Speaker 1: gaps are unbridgable. We'll examine this from the point of
Speaker 1: view of neuroscience and philosophy and literature, and then technology.
Speaker 1: Can new tech ever allow us to better understand what
Speaker 1: it is to be someone else? Or is there an
Speaker 1: inherent impossibility? So let's start with a simple question, what
Speaker 1: is it like to be a bat? Now? This is
Speaker 1: an interesting question because bats are so different from us.
Speaker 1: They are mammals like us, but in many ways their
Speaker 1: lives are unrecognizably foreign to our own. They sleep upside down,
Speaker 1: but more importantly, they navigate through their dark caverns by
Speaker 1: emitting little shrieks, and then their extremely sensitive ears pick
Speaker 1: up on the echoes from that, and they figure out
Speaker 1: the dimensional structure of the world in which they're flying.
Speaker 1: And they can do this with terrific resolutions, such that
Speaker 1: they can catch a flying moth just with this echolocation
Speaker 1: in the pitch black. So in nineteen seventy four, the
Speaker 1: philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote an essay by this title, What
Speaker 1: Is It Like To Be a Bat? And it quickly
Speaker 1: became one of the most famous thought experiments in modern philosophy,
Speaker 1: because it challenges something fundamental about one of our intuitions.
Speaker 1: He suggested that no matter how much we study another
Speaker 1: being's brain or behavior or sensory experiences, we can't ever
Speaker 1: truly grasp what their subjective experience feels like from the inside.
Speaker 1: Nagel used the bat as his example, because seeing the
Speaker 1: world through echolocation is a perfectly good sensory solution, but
Speaker 1: it's totally foreign to cited humans. His point was that
Speaker 1: we can study the process of echolocation scientifically, and we
Speaker 1: can analyze how it works, and we can simulate it
Speaker 1: with machines, and we can measure how a bat's brain
Speaker 1: responds to these signals, but we can't feel it. We
Speaker 1: can't step inside a bat's world and know what it
Speaker 1: is like to move through space by sound. We can
Speaker 1: understand it intellectually, but not experientially. And that brings us
Speaker 1: to the question of this episode and the next one.
Speaker 1: Can you ever truly know what it is like to
Speaker 1: be something else, like another creature? But more importantly, can
Speaker 1: you ever really know what it's like to be another person?
Speaker 1: Not just sympathize with them, but really inhabit their world
Speaker 1: from the inside out, know what it's like to be them.
Speaker 1: When we're children, we think this is self. It's evidently
Speaker 1: true that everyone is like us on the inside. But
Speaker 1: as we get older, we recognize more and more differences,
Speaker 1: and the question becomes more nuanced, because, as I've talked
Speaker 1: about on many episodes, people can be very different from
Speaker 1: one to the next on the inside. So we're gonna
Speaker 1: dive deep into that and what it means. But first
Speaker 1: let's get back to Nagel and bats to set the table.
Speaker 1: Nagel's proposal was that there's something about subjective experience that's
Speaker 1: just not accessible from the outside. So essentially, he said, look,
Speaker 1: even if we had the most detailed scientific account of
Speaker 1: the mental processes in the bat, even if we could
Speaker 1: write down every neuron in the bat's brain and exactly
Speaker 1: what the activity is doing, and even point to the
Speaker 1: genes involved, and we could model the way that echolocation
Speaker 1: works and simulate the bat's behavior perfectly, still we wouldn't
Speaker 1: have answered the question what it is like to be
Speaker 1: that bat? And this is the problem of the subjective
Speaker 1: character of experience. It's not about behavior or function or
Speaker 1: brain states. It's about what it feels like to be
Speaker 1: a conscious creature, and that what it feels like quality.
Speaker 1: This is what we call qualitia, the internal experience of something. Now,
Speaker 1: qualia turn out to be really tough for science. Why
Speaker 1: because science aims for objectivity. It tries to strip away
Speaker 1: individual perspectives so that we can find truths that are
Speaker 1: universally valid. But conscious experience just doesn't cooperate with that.
Speaker 1: Consciousness is defined by perspective. It's the one thing that
Speaker 1: can't be fully described in third person terms. There's no
Speaker 1: outside view of the inside experience. So Nagel pointed to
Speaker 1: bats simply because their sensory world is so different from
Speaker 1: ours that it forces us to confront the limits of
Speaker 1: our imagination. We can imagine what it would be like
Speaker 1: for us to behave like a bat. We can imagine
Speaker 1: hanging upside down, or eating insects, or maybe even using
Speaker 1: sonar as a tool. But that's not what he's asking.
Speaker 1: He's asking what is it like for the bat to
Speaker 1: be the bat? And that he says is something we'll
Speaker 1: never know, not even in principle. And this reminds us
Speaker 1: that knowledge comes in different forms. There's the kind of
Speaker 1: knowledge we can write down and measure and test, and
Speaker 1: then there's the kind that lives only in the first person,
Speaker 1: in the me in the subjective point of view. And
Speaker 1: that second kind, that inner experience, isn't something we can
Speaker 1: share or translate fully, even with the best science. So
Speaker 1: this returns us to the question, can you ever truly
Speaker 1: know what it's like to be another person? Even when
Speaker 1: we're talking about someone we know intimately, we're up against
Speaker 1: a wall because experience is totally private. And maybe this
Speaker 1: is not just a philosophical or scientific challenge. Maybe this
Speaker 1: is a human challenge, because no matter how we try,
Speaker 1: there is a part of every person, every mind that
Speaker 1: is forever out of reach. So let's zoom out for
Speaker 1: a minute to make clear how much difference there is
Speaker 1: between everyone's experience in the world. So let me start
Speaker 1: with just a simple personal example. Many years ago, during
Speaker 1: my postdoctoral fellowship, I dated a young woman and even
Speaker 1: though she was often quite sad inside, she had a
Speaker 1: very stunning Hollywood smile that she would paste on and
Speaker 1: it would light up the room every time she did. So.
Speaker 1: One day we went into a restaurant together and we
Speaker 1: had to get to the back, but it was packed,
Speaker 1: so we had to wind our way through a crowded
Speaker 1: maze of tables to get to the back, and the
Speaker 1: only way we could squeeze through was with me scooching
Speaker 1: in right behind her, And because I was taller than
Speaker 1: she was, I could see over her head as we
Speaker 1: wound our way through, So she was the front guard
Speaker 1: and I was mostly hidden behind her, and what I
Speaker 1: saw was like a VR experience. Suddenly I was seeing
Speaker 1: the world through a different set of eyes because she
Speaker 1: had turned on her smile, and as we wound through
Speaker 1: the crowd, everyone looked up at her and smiled back
Speaker 1: and moved their chairs out of the way. It's not
Speaker 1: that people weren't normally perfectly nice to me alone as well,
Speaker 1: but there was a noticeable difference here. It was like
Speaker 1: I was wearing the costume of someone else, and I
Speaker 1: saw the world through her eyes and how people looked
Speaker 1: at her and reacted to her. I saw how she
Speaker 1: experienced the social realm. Now that told me something about
Speaker 1: her experience of the world, But still the question remains
Speaker 1: about her experience on the inside. What is that like
Speaker 1: to her? We can extrapolate make some guess is but
Speaker 1: how accurate are we? Of course? Lots of people experience
Speaker 1: the world differently. Take height. What would it be like
Speaker 1: if you were looking up at people at a cocktail
Speaker 1: party because you were quite short? Or what's it like
Speaker 1: if you're looking down on people because you're quite tall?
Speaker 1: Does that change your social experience of the world. What
Speaker 1: would it be like if you had much stronger arms
Speaker 1: or legs and could do things yourself that you thought
Speaker 1: you couldn't, or vice versa. What if you were the
Speaker 1: opposite gender or looked very different than you do now?
Speaker 1: There are a thousand little ways in which the body
Speaker 1: that you're trapped in subtly changes your experience in the world.
Speaker 1: But again, that's just the starting point for your internal life.
Speaker 1: And if you've been listening to this podcast for a while,
Speaker 1: you know that one of my main interests is about
Speaker 1: the differences in our internal lives. The world looks and
Speaker 1: sounds and feels a bit different to you than the
Speaker 1: person sitting next to you. Many of my episodes have
Speaker 1: explored this question the astonishing variety of internal experiences that
Speaker 1: people have. For example, take synesthesia. Some people will look
Speaker 1: at letters or numbers on a page and that will
Speaker 1: trigger an experience of color, or that listen to music
Speaker 1: and that will trigger swirling visual forms, or they'll taste
Speaker 1: something and that'll put a feeling on their fingertips. This
Speaker 1: isn't metaphorical stuff. This is a real experience that a
Speaker 1: fraction of the population has. Their senses are crosswired in
Speaker 1: a way that makes their inner world different from someone else's.
Speaker 1: If you're interested in synesthesia, I talk about that at
Speaker 1: length in episode four, or you've heard me talk about
Speaker 1: other ways in which we might see things in our imagination.
Speaker 1: One example of this is the spectrum from hyperfantasia to
Speaker 1: a fantasia, which I talk about in episode fifty nine
Speaker 1: or hyperfantasic, you visualize things with great clarity, almost like
Speaker 1: a movie. If you are a fantasic, you don't form
Speaker 1: any mental images. Let's say I ask you to imagine
Speaker 1: a yellow dog running in a shallow creek in the woods.
Speaker 1: The hyperfantagic person visually imagines that with great detail, almost
Speaker 1: like they're watching it. A fantagic person sees nothing, no dog,
Speaker 1: no color, no visual sense of shape or motion. Everyone
Speaker 1: in the population is spread somewhere along the spectrum and
Speaker 1: having different experiences on the inside. And there are dozens
Speaker 1: of things like this. I've previously talked about word aversion
Speaker 1: in episode twenty six. Word aversion is the immediate emotional
Speaker 1: disgust that some people feel when they hear particular words
Speaker 1: like moist or tissue or slacks or panties or nugget.
Speaker 1: For most people, these words are just vocabulary, but for
Speaker 1: other people they trigger an immediate visceral response like discuss
Speaker 1: or anxiety. The point is across the population, even something
Speaker 1: as simple as how you experience a word can be
Speaker 1: very different from one brain to another. When we start
Speaker 1: looking for examples like these. In neuroscience, things like synesthesia
Speaker 1: or a fantasia or word a version. We just find
Speaker 1: more and more examples. The differences in people's internal worlds
Speaker 1: are real, and they're measurable, as has been done by
Speaker 1: my lab and dozens of others. And I'm attaching some
Speaker 1: studies to the show notes, and these differences between people,
Speaker 1: they're not just about preferences or histories or what we
Speaker 1: pay attention to. It's about the raw feel of experience itself,
Speaker 1: how we perceive the world, how we process it, how
Speaker 1: we represent it internally. And the more we learn about
Speaker 1: these differences, the more are humble we have to become,
Speaker 1: because it turns out that what you think of as
Speaker 1: being a normal human is just one point on a
Speaker 1: vast spectrum of human minds. Now, this doesn't stop us
Speaker 1: from trying to step into another person's shoes. And this
Speaker 1: is the notion of empathy, which is something our brains
Speaker 1: do automatically. Empathy is our brain's ability to simulate what
Speaker 1: someone else is going through, and researchers typically divide this
Speaker 1: into emotional empathy, which is your ability to share the
Speaker 1: emotional experiences of someone else, and cognitive empathy, understanding the
Speaker 1: other person's perspective or their mental state. Now, even though
Speaker 1: empathy seems like just a feeling you experience, it's of course,
Speaker 1: under the hood a biological algorithm. Now you may have
Speaker 1: heard of mirror neurons, which are neurons that become active
Speaker 1: when you perform some action and also when you see
Speaker 1: someone else do that same action. I mention these because
Speaker 1: many people erroneously think that the mirror neuron system is
Speaker 1: the basis of empathy, but in fact, empathy involves much
Speaker 1: more than that, because you also need a whole collection
Speaker 1: of regions that integrate emotional information and social information and
Speaker 1: tell you what are the really salient things to pay
Speaker 1: attention to. So nowadays you can put together hundreds of
Speaker 1: brain imaging studies fMRI to see that there's a whole
Speaker 1: network of brain regions that come online when you're considering
Speaker 1: the emotions of another person, regions like the anterior insula
Speaker 1: and the anterior singulate cortex, and the amygdala and the
Speaker 1: inferior frontal gyrus. Okay, the details don't matter for today's purpose,
Speaker 1: except to say that all these areas consistently come online
Speaker 1: during tasks that require you to simulate another person's state,
Speaker 1: like if you see them experience pain or distress. Even
Speaker 1: though you're not experiencing that, your brain runs the simulation. Now,
Speaker 1: why do we have such a rich system for simulating
Speaker 1: other people in our heads. It's because biologically, empathy is
Speaker 1: not just a nice to have, it's a survival tool.
Speaker 1: It helps us connect and cooperate and parent and navigate
Speaker 1: the complexities of social life. And in that sense, it's
Speaker 1: not just emotional intelligence we're talking about. It's neural engineering
Speaker 1: evolved for living together in large groups. And this is
Speaker 1: why we flinch when we see someone else in pain,
Speaker 1: and also why laughter spreads so easily through a crowd.
Speaker 1: It's because when we witness another person's emotional state, our
Speaker 1: brains simulate it, creating a kind of inner echo of
Speaker 1: what they're feeling. It's not the real thing, but it's
Speaker 1: a rough sketch. And this capacity for empathy is very
Speaker 1: useful for what's known as theory of mind, which I
Speaker 1: talked about in episode seventy two. This is the cognitive
Speaker 1: ability to understand that other people have thoughts and feelings
Speaker 1: and perspectives different from yours. Little kids don't have theory
Speaker 1: of mind, but it develops through early childhood and that
Speaker 1: moment when a Toddler realizes that another mind is not
Speaker 1: the same as theirs. This marks the beginning of perspective taking.
Speaker 1: This is the foundation of social connection and storytelling and
Speaker 1: even deception, because without theory of mind, you'd be stuck
Speaker 1: in your own mental bubble. And by the way, having
Speaker 1: good theory of mind is something we keep refining our
Speaker 1: whole lives. Some people become especially fluent in it, especially
Speaker 1: people like actors or therapists or even parents. Other people
Speaker 1: struggle with theory of mind, not because they're cruel, but
Speaker 1: because the skill of imagining someone else's internal world takes
Speaker 1: practice and effort and humility and the right kind of
Speaker 1: neural circuitry. So we are as species who tries to
Speaker 1: model one another. We try to step into each other's shoes,
Speaker 1: but we're really not so good at it. Mostly we
Speaker 1: just assume that everyone else is like us on the inside.
Speaker 1: When you really look at empathy, you can see that
Speaker 1: what we're really doing is imposing our models on what
Speaker 1: we think the other person is feeling. As a really
Speaker 1: good example of this, I've noticed this with videos of
Speaker 1: robots produced by a company called Boston Dynamics. You might
Speaker 1: have seen these. They are these robots that look like
Speaker 1: metal dogs, and one of the things the company wanted
Speaker 1: to show is that these dogs are robust against being
Speaker 1: knocked off course. So the robot dog is running forward
Speaker 1: in the video and someone comes out and kicks it,
Speaker 1: and the robot's legs do a quick scramble, and even
Speaker 1: though it tilts to the side, it manages to stay
Speaker 1: upright and it keeps going, which is very impressive. But
Speaker 1: here's the thing. I've seen dozens of people watch these
Speaker 1: videos and they WinCE. Their empathy is stoked. And I
Speaker 1: get it. It looks like a creature, it looks like
Speaker 1: a sentient being, and it's getting kicked. It's really difficult
Speaker 1: to watch this and not feel an empathic sting. But
Speaker 1: I think what this illustrates is our propensity to imagine
Speaker 1: that other things feel the way we do, even when
Speaker 1: there's really no good reason to imagine that we're looking
Speaker 1: at anything other than a collection of nuts and bolts
Speaker 1: and wires in the case of this robot. So, in
Speaker 1: other words, our feelings of empathy are a massively important
Speaker 1: part of our success as a species. Details presumably say
Speaker 1: more about us than they do about the accuracy of
Speaker 1: the feeling in other words, how much your assumptions about
Speaker 1: the inner life of the other is right on target.
Speaker 1: I'll give you another example of the weirdness of this
Speaker 1: our responses to reading or watching fiction. One of the
Speaker 1: classes I teach at Stanford is called Literature and the Brain,
Speaker 1: and an issue I always talk about with amazement is
Speaker 1: the fact that we shed tears, or we laugh out loud,
Speaker 1: or we worry or we agonize over the pain of
Speaker 1: somebody else, someone we know is not real. You're reading
Speaker 1: about let's say John Snow in Game of Thrones, and
Speaker 1: you're aware that the whole world he's in isn't even real.
Speaker 1: The author can tell us, look, this is fiction. There
Speaker 1: can be a giant sign in front of you that
Speaker 1: says this is a string of words depicting a world
Speaker 1: that is totally made up, And it won't stop tears
Speaker 1: running down your cheek once something bad happens to John
Speaker 1: snow Now. I'll come back to literature and empathy in
Speaker 1: a moment, because I think literature is one of our
Speaker 1: most important tools for expanding the fence lines of our empathy.
Speaker 1: But for now, I'm just making the point that simply
Speaker 1: because you feel that someone else must be feeling the
Speaker 1: same thing you are. You might be talking about a
Speaker 1: robot or an explicitly made up character, and you'll still
Speaker 1: impose what you believe is this is what that person
Speaker 1: must be feeling. And obviously it's not just with robots
Speaker 1: or fictional characters. We empathize more with people we assume
Speaker 1: are more like us, and that might not be accurate.
Speaker 1: So in episode twenty, I talked about neuroimaging experiments in
Speaker 1: my lab where we put people into the brain scanner
Speaker 1: and we showed them six hands, and one of the
Speaker 1: hands gets selected by the computer and you see that
Speaker 1: hand get stabbed with a syringe needle. This activates a
Speaker 1: net work in your brain that we summarize as the
Speaker 1: pain matrix. And as I mentioned before, this is the
Speaker 1: neural basis of empathy. You're having this fireworks show in
Speaker 1: your brain light up, even though it wasn't your hand
Speaker 1: that got stabbed. You're just watching someone else's hand, and
Speaker 1: yet you are simulating the pain involved. But here's the
Speaker 1: key thing. We then labeled each hand with a one
Speaker 1: word label Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Scientologist, atheist, Hindu, and now
Speaker 1: the computer picks the hands one at a time. And
Speaker 1: you see them get stabbed with this syringe needle. And
Speaker 1: the question is do you care as much if it's
Speaker 1: any of the members of your out group versus the
Speaker 1: label of your in group. So we studied one hundred
Speaker 1: and five people on this and the answer was clear.
Speaker 1: Your brain has a large empathic response when you see
Speaker 1: the hand with your group label get stabbed, and it
Speaker 1: just doesn't muster the same degree of response when it's
Speaker 1: anyone else getting stabbed. And this was equally true across
Speaker 1: all the groups, including the atheists, who cared more when
Speaker 1: they saw the atheist hand get stabbed. So in earlier
Speaker 1: episodes I talked all about the meaning of this from
Speaker 1: a societal point of view, but for today I want
Speaker 1: to emphasize that whatever your religion is or your non religion,
Speaker 1: there are literally millions or billions of people who belong
Speaker 1: to that label too with you, and they are all
Speaker 1: as different as can be, and the spread is enormous,
Speaker 1: And so the idea that you would care for those
Speaker 1: millions of people more than other millions of people suggests
Speaker 1: again that your empathy is not so much about climbing
Speaker 1: into someone else's head, but instead about imposing your model
Speaker 1: onto the external world. So whether that's for robots or
Speaker 1: for John Snow or your group label, it really just
Speaker 1: represents your internal world more than an actual bridge that
Speaker 1: reaches a cross and connects with another. And this I
Speaker 1: think illuminates an important facet of our human experience. We
Speaker 1: started off with the question of whether you can ever
Speaker 1: truly know what it's like to be someone else, And
Speaker 1: on the surface, it seems like we do this all
Speaker 1: the time. We empathize, we imagine, we say things like
Speaker 1: I know exactly how you feel. But do we actually
Speaker 1: when we say to someone that we know how they feel.
Speaker 1: We mean it as a comfort, But sometimes it misses
Speaker 1: the mark because even though two people can go through
Speaker 1: something similar, the emotional landscape can be entirely different. Think
Speaker 1: about somebody that you know really well, maybe your partner,
Speaker 1: and think about some moment in their life that was
Speaker 1: emotionally charged, some loss or some triumph. You might have
Speaker 1: even been there, but did you experience it exactly as
Speaker 1: they did, or is it possible there was something else
Speaker 1: going on inside there in her cosmos? So here's an example.
Speaker 1: A listener recently wrote into me about losing his father.
Speaker 1: He described sitting at the hospital bedside, holding his father's hand,
Speaker 1: feeling the warmth drain away. A friend of his, who
Speaker 1: had also lost a parent, worked to comfort him by saying,
Speaker 1: I know exactly how you feel. But instead of feeling seen,
Speaker 1: he felt misunderstood, because in that moment, his grief was
Speaker 1: raw and specific, tied to a lifetime of private memories
Speaker 1: and smells and words and rituals. His friend's grief was
Speaker 1: real too, but it wasn't the same. This is where
Speaker 1: the question of understanding a bat or another person matters,
Speaker 1: because we share space, we share language, but we can't
Speaker 1: always share perspective. Even when we use the same words,
Speaker 1: like grief or joy or fear, what those as words
Speaker 1: refer to feels different inside of you and me and
Speaker 1: everyone we know. As another example, you and I might
Speaker 1: both bite into an orange and say it tastes sweet,
Speaker 1: But your sweetness is not necessarily my sweetness. It's a
Speaker 1: private event dressed up in public language. Now take that
Speaker 1: idea and stretch it to more complex experiences. What is
Speaker 1: it like to grow up in a war zone, to
Speaker 1: live with chronic pain, to navigate the world in a
Speaker 1: body or a mind that's profoundly different from yours? We
Speaker 1: can ask questions, we can listen, we can learn, but
Speaker 1: we also have to acknowledge that there is a hidden
Speaker 1: interior to every life. And this is something that no
Speaker 1: brain scan, no survey, no biology jargon is ever going
Speaker 1: to fully capture. So probably the best thing to do
Speaker 1: with a friend or loved one is not to assume
Speaker 1: that you've been there too, but to be willing to say,
Speaker 1: haven't been there, but I'm here with you now. Now
Speaker 1: this whole episode so far, I've been emphasizing how poor
Speaker 1: we are at expanding our models to know what it
Speaker 1: is like to me someone else, Even among humans' experience
Speaker 1: is just not fully shareable. Empathy isn't mind melding what
Speaker 1: we have our approximations. These are efforts to close the gap,
Speaker 1: but these aren't bridges that actually close it. And yet,
Speaker 1: although we can never do it perfectly, we can get
Speaker 1: better at it through life experience. And one of the
Speaker 1: ways this can be magnified is through the reading of
Speaker 1: literary fiction. There have been a number of studies showing
Speaker 1: that reading literary fiction, especially complex character driven stories, can
Speaker 1: improve people's abilities to understand other people's thoughts and emotions.
Speaker 1: One study from twenty thirteen, published in the journal Science,
Speaker 1: found that people who read even a short excerpt of
Speaker 1: literary fiction scored better on tests of theory of mind
Speaker 1: the ability to infer other people's beliefs and desires and emotions.
Speaker 1: The comparison group, by the way, read nonfiction or popular
Speaker 1: genre fiction. The idea is that good fiction asks you
Speaker 1: to inhabit unfamiliar minds. You track subtle emotional shifts, you
Speaker 1: decode social cues, you grapple with ambiguous motives. You're simulating
Speaker 1: other people's minds, and you're getting concentrated practice at it.
Speaker 1: What we find in the brain scanner is that when
Speaker 1: you're reading, this engages the default mode network, which is
Speaker 1: involved in self reflect and imagining other perspectives, and it
Speaker 1: engages other areas that are tied to empathy and social reasoning.
Speaker 1: So every time you get lost in a novel, you're
Speaker 1: training your brain to be a little bit better at
Speaker 1: knowing what it's like to be other people. President Barack
Speaker 1: Obama did an interview with The New York Times in
Speaker 1: twenty seventeen, and he said, I think that I found
Speaker 1: myself better able to imagine what's going on in the
Speaker 1: lives of people throughout my presidency because of not just
Speaker 1: a specific novel, but the act of reading fiction. It
Speaker 1: exercises those muscles, and I think that has been helpful.
Speaker 1: End quote. This is what literature is good at. We
Speaker 1: get to experience life from a different point of view.
Speaker 1: And this can sometimes apply to nonfiction too. Take Helen Keller,
Speaker 1: a woman who is deaf and blind. She wrote about
Speaker 1: how her reality was shaped by the actile world of
Speaker 1: touch and vibration, not by the vision and hearing that
Speaker 1: most of us take for granted. When we read her,
Speaker 1: we aren't accessing her world directly. We're just catching reflections
Speaker 1: of it. But nonetheless it expands our otherwise naturally small
Speaker 1: view of things. It exercises those muscles, and it makes
Speaker 1: us cognitively broader. In the book To Kill a Mockingbird,
Speaker 1: the character Atticus Finch says, quote, you never really understand
Speaker 1: a person until you consider things from his point of view,
Speaker 1: until you climb inside of his skin and walk around
Speaker 1: in it. End quote. Now, as we've said, you're not
Speaker 1: really walking around in their skin, but you can get
Speaker 1: better at trying it. But I was thinking about that
Speaker 1: idea of climbing inside someone's skin and walking around in it.
Speaker 1: And this idea leads to one of the most intriguing
Speaker 1: frontiers in empathy research today, which is virtual reality. Because
Speaker 1: VR can tempt, imp rarely place you in someone else's shoes,
Speaker 1: not metaphorically, but perceptually, and researchers have started to use
Speaker 1: this as a way to see if they can enhance empathy.
Speaker 1: So in one line of studies, people put on a
Speaker 1: VR headset and they experienced life as a person from
Speaker 1: a different background. So, for example, you can inhabit the
Speaker 1: body of someone of a different race, or a different gender,
Speaker 1: or different ability. You don't just look at them, You
Speaker 1: look down and you see your body as theirs. You
Speaker 1: move your hands and their hands move. It's an embodied simulation,
Speaker 1: and these studies showed that it can measurably increase people's empathy.
Speaker 1: A similar study comes from my colleagues at Stanford. You
Speaker 1: put on VR goggles and you get to experience what
Speaker 1: it's like to become homeless, to lose your home, your belongings,
Speaker 1: your place in the world. So they run the VR
Speaker 1: experience and then afterward people report greater concern for homelessness,
Speaker 1: and they are significantly more likely to sign petitions for
Speaker 1: housing initiatives. What makes virtual reality powerful in these studies
Speaker 1: is that it bypasses the usual roots of reading or
Speaker 1: listening or imagining, and instead it plugs into your perspective
Speaker 1: at a sensory level. Your brain thinks, I know I'm
Speaker 1: not this person, but it feels like I am, and
Speaker 1: empathy begins to take root. So today's episode set the
Speaker 1: table for something very important, which is the question of
Speaker 1: the limits of our objective understanding. We began with Thomas
Speaker 1: Nagel's question what is it like to be a bat?
Speaker 1: Which illustrated the difficulty or maybe the impossibility, of ever
Speaker 1: being able to answer that question, because even if we
Speaker 1: can measure everything about the bat's neurons and firing patterns,
Speaker 1: it doesn't tell us what it's like to be on
Speaker 1: the inside to be the bat. And we then looked
Speaker 1: at what this means for understand inning other people. We
Speaker 1: all like to imagine that our empathy lets us step
Speaker 1: into the shoes of another person, but as we see
Speaker 1: from our empathic responses to robots or fictional characters, it's
Speaker 1: not necessarily that we're having a mind to mind connection,
Speaker 1: but instead empathy is an expression of our own internal
Speaker 1: model you're imagining what the other person feels, but that
Speaker 1: may or may not have much relation to the reality
Speaker 1: of it. And the study I told you about with
Speaker 1: the labeled hands getting stabbed with a syringe needle, it
Speaker 1: turns out everyone cares more about their own in group
Speaker 1: than whatever their outgroups are, and so that suggests that
Speaker 1: empathy isn't even a terribly sophisticated model, but instead is
Speaker 1: greatly swayed by whether people remind us of ourselves. So
Speaker 1: when we're tempted to say I know exactly how you feel,
Speaker 1: maybe we should pause, because what we really mean is
Speaker 1: I can imagine my version of your experience, and that's
Speaker 1: not necessarily the same thing, but maybe it's enough to
Speaker 1: try to reach, even knowing that we're never going to
Speaker 1: fully arrive, because while we can't fully be someone else,
Speaker 1: the attempt to understand them, even knowing it's incomplete, can
Speaker 1: still be helpful because the project of human connection isn't
Speaker 1: actually about perfect simulation. It's about making room in our
Speaker 1: minds for perspectives that will never fully grasp And this
Speaker 1: leads to a little bit of hope because we can
Speaker 1: get practice at expanding our fence lines, as seen in
Speaker 1: the reading of literature and even experiencing other lives VR
Speaker 1: This sort of exercise can provably expand our internal models,
Speaker 1: at least a little bit, giving us a richer sense
Speaker 1: of different people in different situations. Reading and experiencing it
Speaker 1: makes our empathy a bit wider. But I want to
Speaker 1: come back now to the question I started with, Could
Speaker 1: you ever know what it is like to be someone else?
Speaker 1: Today's episode suggests it's not so easy, But there's an
Speaker 1: interesting question that struck me from the time I was
Speaker 1: a kid, and the longer I've studied neuroscience, the more
Speaker 1: the question seems relevant to me. Could technology ever allow
Speaker 1: us to know what it's really like to be someone else?
Speaker 1: Could we use new techniques or even techniques that will
Speaker 1: exist in the distant future that would allow us to
Speaker 1: change the firing patterns in our brains to make those
Speaker 1: patterns like someone else. Could we do this with electrodes
Speaker 1: or with nanobots or do we have old fashioned ways
Speaker 1: of doing this with pharmacology that could shed light on this?
Speaker 1: And what does this have to do with replaying someone
Speaker 1: else's memories or a future with dreams? Celebrities who have
Speaker 1: dreams that go viral or the idea of hooking two
Speaker 1: brains directly together so people can experience each other's reas reality.
Speaker 1: Want to know the answers, Please join me next week
Speaker 1: for part two of Could You ever Really Know what
Speaker 1: It's like to be someone else? I can't wait to
Speaker 1: see you. Then go to eagleman dot com slash podcast
Speaker 1: for more information and to find further reading. Send me
Speaker 1: an email at podcasts at eagleman dot com with questions
Speaker 1: or discussion. Join my substack at David Eigleman dot substack
Speaker 1: dot com and check out and subscribe to Inner Cosmos
Speaker 1: on YouTube for videos of each episode and to leave
Speaker 1: comments Until next time. I'm David Eagleman and this is
Speaker 1: Inner Cosmos.