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produced by RIIKKA HAIKARAINEN & STEPHANIE CASE

When you feel the urge to hug someone in tears, your brain’s neural connections are creating compassion. This kind of empathy is often considered somehow “softhearted.” At the same time, our society would not function without the ability to walk in other person’s shoes.

Compassion has many clear benefits which have been studied extensively in mathematics, neuroscience and evolutionary biology. Yet if being compassionate is both reasonable and logical, why do we still struggle with it so much?

We invited three accomplished experts to talk about their own perspectives in compassion.

Amy Parish, a biological anthropologist and Darwinian feminist, has been researching bonobos, one of our closest living relatives, for over twenty years. For her, the ability for compassion is something we humans share with other primates, like bonobos.

“It really doesn’t come as a surprise to me that other primates share the capacity for empathy and compassion, cooperation, anger, sorrow, happiness – it seems quite natural to me,” Parish says.

Gregg Chadwick, a painter based at Santa Monica Arts Studios, considers art as a tool for attracting and reinforcing compassion – an approach that has driven him to create art that evokes peace and justice. This year, he painted about Ferguson demonstrations. He was inspired by the snapshot a young man flinging a cylinder of police-aimed teargas away from peaceful protestors.

“One of the things I love about the arts is how we are transported. We’re transported into another person’s way of looking at the world,” Chadwick says.

KC Cole is a professor at the Annenberg School for Journalism, teaching science journalism and critical thinking. She has a passion for physics and combining science with arts. According to Cole, science affects not only how we think but how we feel about things and our connection with our fellow humans.

“What you learn from physics is that you can have very seemingly contradictory points of view which are both true, so it’s okay to understand people,” Cole says.

& EXTRA

Amy Parish, Gregg Chadwick and KC Cole will be speakers at Categorically Not, an event taking place Sunday, December 7th at 6 p.m. at Santa Monica Art Studios. For more than ten years, Categorically Not has invited three people from three different fields – including the sciences and arts – to give short presentations or performances that reflect a common theme.