BETWEEN Stimulus & Response

In this excerpt from an interview done in August 2016, DR. JAMES DOTY is interviewed by JOHN MALKIN about the science of meditation, the evolutionary advantage of compassion, aspects of human behavior that relate to compassion and collective social issues, and his cherished memories of the remarkable woman who gave him a helping hand up when he was a boy.

- JOHN MALKIN

Q: Tell us about the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE) that you founded at Stanford University. Sometimes people think compassion is internal, vague and hard to describe, and that exploring compassion is a soft science. How are you studying compassion and altruism and what are you finding?

There’s been a lot of interest in how the brain responds or reacts to meditation and this research has been going on for the last three decades, initially led by Rick Hanson. But what is interesting to me, and remains interesting, is that what is at the core of many of these meditative practices is compassion: compassion for yourself certainly, and compassion for others.

As I looked at this area, I realized that our survival is related to nurturing and caring for our offspring. And in the human species this involves caring not only for our offspring but for others as well. As a result of this requirement – that our offspring are nurtured for a decade and a half or more after birth, unlike other mammals that just run off into the forest after birth – our offspring require us to essentially teach them, while they mirror our behaviors, so that they will survive. Yet the cost of that to our species – to the parents or the mother – is huge with regard to time, resources and energy. Without that nurturing, caring and bonding, our offspring don’t survive.