Dr. Richard Davidson

But the words don't matter, whatever words are most well-suited for each person.

But then you move on to different categories of people.

So you start with a loved one, you then move on to yourself,

You then move on to a category of person that we call a stranger.

And a stranger is someone you recognize, whose face you recognize.

But you don't know them well.

It could be someone that works in the same building that you work in.

It could be a classmate.

It could be a bus driver.

It could be the cashier at a local store.

store that you go to, a barista.

You don't know anything about them, but you recognize them, and you can envision a time in their life when they may have had some difficulty, even if you don't know anything about their life.

So you do that with the stranger, and then finally you move on to what's probably the most important category,

which is a difficult person, someone who pushes your buttons.

And you genuinely bring them into your mind and your heart and you recognize a time, you imagine a time when they have been having some challenge and you cultivate the aspiration that they be relieved of that suffering.

And that practice just done a few minutes a day can change your brain and it changes your behavior.

So one of the key regions of the brain that's been implicated in empathy is the temporal parietal junction.

What we see is that in this kind of compassion practice there's significantly enhanced activation of the temporal parietal junction, particularly in response to stimuli of people in distress.

There's also networks in the brain that are involved in positive affect that are activated by this kind of practice.

And behaviorally, we've shown using hard-nosed tasks that are derived from behavioral economics and neuroeconomics, we actually have demonstrated and other scientists have demonstrated this, that people behave more altruistically.