Wonderful. So, we're going to use this next hour and a half to really dive

deeply into the notions of empathy and resilience and look at how the Roots of

Empathy program may be doing a very profound service, not only for the kids

who are fortunate enough to be in the program, but for the communities that

those children will either directly be a part of or even indirectly influence. So,

what I'd like to do is just to begin with this photograph here. Can everyone

see it? Yeah, so this is a photograph taken clearly at a day of Roots of

Empathy...and how many of you have actually had the opportunity to be at a

Roots of Empathy classroom experience? Raise your hand. So it's, okay, so it's

about three-quarters of us. Okay so, we had the opportunity yesterday to go to a

school here in Toronto. Did I say the right? Is it Torono? (Audience Lauging) So Toronto, I think is

how you say it...and, and, and to be in the classroom just like this actually where

you see this incredible moment of the children in the classroom, who are

getting to know this baby and the mom as this baby grows for the first year of

life. So, if you just look at the photo you'll think, oh that's really cute...

and that's fine, but we're going to say beyond cute, there's profound things that

are happening here, not just in this moment, but for all the moments that will

unfold in these children's lives. So, I'd like to just take that apart piece by

piece and as we go through why this experience

is so profound, what I'd like to do is just give you a framework on where this

is coming from. So, you heard in the bio, you know I'm a

Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, but actually the world I work in is a field

called Interpersonal Neurobiology...and that's a

term that I had to make up because what I was

doing back in the late 80s and early 90s didn't have a name and it was basically

saying this -- if you combined all the fields of science together...so, if you

took anthropology (studying culture), and sociology (studying our interaction in

groups), and linguistics (for how we use language to speak to each other), and

psychology (for studies of memory and attention and behavior), and biology

(including medicine and psychiatry, where you study the functions of the body and what

gives rise to life), and chemistry (how molecules interact with each other)...I'm

trained as a biochemist...or getting down to physics even (how properties of the

universe govern how things happen), and then even get to another level,

mathematics. What would happen if you took everything from math to

anthropology and saw the common ground among all those fields? So, that was an

effort that I became obsessed with in the beginning of the decade of the brain,

the early 90s, because people were saying something that Hippocrates had said

since 2,500 years ago that the mind is basically only coming from your head,

that the mind was just brain activity... and then William James, the grandfather

of modern psychology, reaffirmed that in 1890 in a book called The Principles of

Psychology...but for me as a trained psychotherapist, it just seemed to be

only part of a much bigger picture and in my field, a branch of medicine --

psychiatry, people were being reduced to bags of chemicals and being told, "You are

a depressive", or, "You are a schizophrenic"... and the attitude among many of my

colleagues was that these names that were being given were telling the whole

story...and of course there were a number of things that pushed psychiatry in that

direction, the idea to have this nomenclature called the Diagnostic and

Statistical Manual and things like that or insurance companies saying, "Yeah, we

only take people who are going to be treated for brief

as of time on these medications", or the medication industry, or even the identity

crisis that my field in psychiatry had, which was how are we really different

from anybody else, you know? So, we prescribe medication. So, there were lots

of forces at work at the decade of the brain that fit with the science that

basically said mind is a synonym for brain activity. So, part of why I give you that

background is because you can hear a lot of conviction by really smart people,

scientists, that actually may not correlate with its accuracy. So, is mind

just the activity of the brain? Is it just a word meaning the same thing? So, I

brought all these scientists together from all these fields I'm speaking about

and we tried to ask the question what is a relationship between the mind and the

brain and that's a whole other long story, but what I'm about to tell you

about Roots of Empathy comes from this effort beginning in the early 90s that

ultimately we called interpersonal neurobiology, which is to say, what

happens in the betweenness?...like right here...what's happening in the betweenness,

the inter?...and what's happening with the within this, the personal?...and then how

can we understand that scientifically? So, I just use the term neurobiology but the

idea is that there's something much more than just something going on the brain.

The brain is really important, but to limit it, to limit the mind and

mental life to just the brain is actually, I think, scientifically

inaccurate, even though it's been around for 2,500 years, even though it's the

90, over 90 percent of academics will say that to you...and maybe some of you are

from academics and want to jump up and say, "You're reversing science!"...or

something like that...but I think what has hampered science is by equating mind

with brain. So, in interpersonal neurobiology we don't do that. So, you can

say, you know, if you look at the bottom of this thing, Roots of Empathy...it's

mission is to, "...build caring, peaceful and civil societies". So, if you're looking at

societies, you're going to look at culture, right?

So, you need to understand anthropology and sociology, and that the mind is

coming from the betweenness as much as the within this, to understand that part

of the sentence, through the development... so, we have to understand development,

which is what we'll talk about today... through development. So, let me move this

back without breaking it so you can see over there. So right now, I'm thinking

about the mental experience of you guys on that table and you're not seeing the

photograph. So, I'm going to try to move it but there are wires. Can you see it

now? Okay, but that probably looks terrible for everyone else so...my

daughter would say, "You should have made it aesthetically pleasing". Okay

so, through the development, so we need to understand that, of this word empathy,

right?...and empathy is an interesting word. So, even just in terms of linguistics, we

have to be very careful the words we use because some of you may know that

empathy is getting a bad rap in a number of fields in the last two to

three years. Anyone heard these anti- empathy things? So, an anti-empathy person

sitting in this room would go, "Oh God, they are really doing a bad thing"...or

like I wrote a book for teenagers called Brainstorm, where I was encouraging the

development of empathy and one of my reviewers wrote, "You're really not up on

the current science. Empathy has been proven to be bad, so you're encouraging a

bad thing". Literally that was a note. So I wrote back to the reviewer and I said,

"Please tell me more about your feelings about it being a bad thing"...and she

wrote, "You're obviously not aware of the work of Tania Singer", who's a

neurobiology researcher in Germany. So I said, "Actually I'm very aware of her work

but thank you for your input". So, then a few months later, actually a few years

later, I was teaching in Berlin and Tania Singer was one of the people on the

stage with me. So I said, "Tanya, I need to get this straight from you...people are

quoting you, telling me, that when I encourage empathy just like Roots of

Empathy encourages it, that I'm doing a bad thing". So, I'm going to just leave

that in the room. We're going to come back to what Tania said because it won't

make any sense until I explain everything else, but you'll see what she said...

and in children and adults. So, this is the idea that we're going to explore

from an interpersonal neurobiology point of view. So to do that can get a little

weird, so luckily the Mary's have given you safety belts to put on your chairs

because we're going to actually explore a lot of stuff that is stuff that you

often don't hear, but it's really worth taking the ride to see, I think the

bigger picture of things. So, if you're taking notes, I'm going to try to

highlight the take-home points. If you don't want to take notes, much of this

stuff is in these various books that you heard about. Mind would be a good place

to see the wild ride of it, Pocket Guide to Interpersonal Neurobiology would get the

the fundamental points, a book called Mindsight, you'd see some of the elements and

Brainstorm is the book for adolescents to develop empathy. So there's a lot

written on it, we have all sorts of online training and stuff like that. So,

there's lots of stuff. This is going to be like a highlights time, but it goes

like this...if you say these children in Roots of Empathy, the kids in the

classroom are having an experience, it's going to change them right? If you just

take that statement that this intervention, Roots of Empathy, for a

child who gets to experience it, is going to alter their development. Just take

that basic statement. Would everyone agree that, that's why it's being done,

right? Anyone would...who agrees with that, that? That sounds about right. Okay, half the

people. Okay, very good...alright so, I've got to convince the other half. An

intervention, the reason to do it, is it influences somebody in some way. So, the

first thing we have to ask is -- how does that happen? How does an experience...

bless you, bless you, let's have a bless you for everyone who is going to

sneeze...bless you...so how does that happen that this young boy, having this

experience over the year, is going to be different if you study the outcomes

that he'd be different or that baby...what's your baby's name? Jude? So Jude is

going to have a certain kind of experience. I don't put pressure on you,

based on what her mom does with her...his okay, his...I was thinking of Hey Jude but

this is a different Jude...so based on what his mom is going to do, right? So, we

have an actual example, a photograph example, and then the idea of Roots of

Empathy...so what actually is happening there, that this child gets to spend time

in a roots of empathy program where Jude is interacting with his mom, like he's doing

right now? What's actually happening there? It's a connection, it's a

connection, exactly. What is...if you were a Martian dropping down from Mars, coming

to this planet right, and you have your own Martian thing that you do but you're

just a careful observer called a scientist...that's what a scientist is

observing, right?...and you're observing this happening here or observing Jude

with his mom...what would you actually be observing? What is it that's happening? So,

there's eye contact, right, you can see this baby,

let's call him Jude. Baby Jude here, is looking right into the eyes of this

student, right? So there's eye contact and what is eye contact at its...if you're a

Martian and you, you don't have words like eye contact, what, what would you

actually be observing? What's that? It's a communication, exactly, but you don't have

a word called communication...but you'd be observing communication and what is this

eye contact communication made of? What's that? Emotion. So you don't have a word

for emotion, you know so, but you, but we could say it's emotion because we

experience it from the inside out...but if you were a Martian watching this and you

didn't have a word for emotion what would you actually see? Now this is not an easy

exercise, but let me just say this - it's an essential exercise. So I'm trained as

an attachment researcher, so after I trained in psychiatry

I wanted to...and child psychiatry, I wanted to know, how does a healthy mind

develop? So, back in the late 80s I chose to get a National Institute of Mental

Health research fellowship to study attachment