Dr. David Eagleman

That's interesting.

I don't know.

I don't think anyone's run that experiment to my knowledge.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's a really interesting point.

To my knowledge, no one has done that experiment.

And in a sense, it's because this issue of when something bad happens to someone, we naturally have an empathic response if it's a stranger.

Look at the issue of, I don't know, let's say...

Some older gentleman gets his nose broken because someone attacks him outdoors at a park.

You would feel empathy for that.

But now if I tell you, oh, look, he was at a Democrat rally or a Republican rally, depending on your perspective on the world, you might have differential empathy predicated on how strongly you feel on one team or the other.

Here's the thing.

Even with pancreatic cancer –

There's a whole lot of experience from my lab and other labs that shows that sometimes when something happens to someone that we don't like, the reward system actually comes on.

This was – Tanya Singh had a Nature paper on this showing that you actually show reward system activation when something happens, which is awful.

But –

One thing I have always noticed in the movies is that you're watching the James Bond movie or whatever.

And the bad guy, you know, falls from a 500 foot building and splats on the ground.

And you like, you know, eat your popcorn.

You don't care at all that something awful happened to somebody.