The Neurobiology of Empathy, with UChicago’s Dr Peggy Mason | EDB 248

 

UChicago’s Dr. Peggy Mason discusses her work on the neurobiological basis of empathy.

(VIDEO – 34 mins) Dr. Mason grew up in the Washington DC area and worked in taxidermy at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History during middle and high school. She received her BA in Biology in 1983 and her PhD in Neuroscience in 1987, both from Harvard. After postdoctoral work at the University of California – San Francisco, she joined the faculty at the University of Chicago in 1992. Dr Mason is now Professor of Neurobiology. For more than 20 years, Dr Mason’s research was focused on the cellular mechanisms of pain modulation. In the last ten plus years, Dr Mason has turned her energies to the biology of empathy and helping behavior in rats. Dr Mason taught medical students for 25 years and wrote a textbook for medical students, now in its second edition (Medical Neurobiology, Oxford University Press, 2nd edition, 2017). Dr Mason started the Neuroscience major at UChicago and was awarded the Quantrell Award, the nation’s oldest prize for undergraduate teaching, in 2018. More broadly, Dr Mason is a neuroevangelist, interested in teaching neurobiology to anyone that will listen. 

For more about Dr. Mason: thebrainissocool.com

Her Coursera course “Understanding the Brain: The Neurobiology of Everyday Life” can be seen here: www.coursera.org/course/neurobio 

 

 

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FULL TRANSCRIPTION


HACKIE REITMAN, MD (HR):  

Hi, I’m Dr. Hackie Reitman. Welcome to another episode of Exploring Different Brains. And today I’m honored to have the neurobiologist and the neuro-evangelist all the way from the University of Chicago. And we have with us today, Peggy. Peggy Introduce yourself properly because I’m being too informal.

PEGGY MASON, Ph.D. (PM):  

Okay, so my name is Peggy Mason. I’m a professor of neurobiology at the University of Chicago. As hackie said, I am a neuro-evangelist, I think neurobiology is a is the lens through which life looks the rosiest and most interesting and the rosiest, yes.

HR:  

Well, that’s a good way of putting it. How did you get into neurobiology?

PM:  

Um, yeah, I realized somewhere late in college that I actually had to get a way to make a living and and I thought, Oh, I’d like to go to grad school, I’d like to learn something more. I like this student thing. And, and I looked around and, and I’ve always been very interested in neurobiology. You know, I had seizures as a kid that was sort of interesting, horrible, interesting to me. And, and I’d read Oliver Sacks, somewhere along the lines, I actually don’t remember when I started reading “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat”. But that was a very intriguing to me in it, you know, the, the intersection of neurobiology with why people do what they do. That sort of always interesting people watching question. Um, it intrigued me in a way that, you know, how does a heart or Alon work has never particularly intrigued me. So I find the nervous system endlessly fascinating. And I actually find the behavior of animals as fast as other animals besides humans, as fascinating as the behavior of humans. So you know, I can get lost in my cat’s behavior as well. And my original study was in ethology, which is the study of animal behavior, usually accepting humans as though humans are not an animal, which they are, but nonetheless…

HR:  

Reading over your resume, it’s quite a journey of hat. I mean, being the slacker that you want to go to Harvard of all places for all you degrees, and then go to the Smithsonian for — Am I correct? It was taxidermy.

PM:  

Well, I started in at taxidermy as a single digit child. So my mother and I, from the best that we can reconstruct it. I think I started around seven.

HR:  

Wow.

PM:  

And before I was 10, probably by the time I was 9, possibly 10. I was teaching, because I’d taken it too many times. And so the instructor who was Charles Handling, Jr, who was at that he was the curator of mammals at the Smithsonian, just said, you know, hey, come help me teach. So I did. And I loved it. And there’s taxidermy is a is a skill. It’s a skill that Darwin had. And anything I can do to ever emulate Darwin is good in my books.

HR:  

The evolution and survival. Tell us about your journey from pain to empathy.

PM:  

Yeah, so the the pain field was really interesting. I did most of my work, my postdoc work was around a very dominant theme in the pain modulation field, which is: how does morphine work? And that obviously has some applicability to the biomedical enterprise. But I took it in a slightly different direction. And I said, Well, what does this pain modulation business do for a behaving animal and so we were looking at conditions. behavior is actually where an animal’s receptivity to noxious stimulation was modulated. And I’ll give you my favorite example, this was worked on by Madeline Baez, which is that for the six seconds that an A rat takes to urinate, um, the rat is insensitive to pain and that operates through the same pathways that morphine analgesia acts. So that’s, that was really fun. And we also looked at food consumption. So while you’re chewing, your, the rats are pretty insensitive. And then this holds true actually for babies. So it’s nice to see the parallels that others have reached. Pain is an interesting perception because it was the, it was the perception where empathy first, empathy, research first focused. So in other words, I can see another individual in experiencing appearing to experience pain and experience something akin to pain myself. So if you’ve ever seen somebody be injured, oh, you know, there’s that cringe, nothing’s happened to you. And yet you are feeling a piece of that other individuals experience. And in 2006, Jeff Mogil from McGill University, published a papers showing that mice in the presence of other mice who were also exposed to noxious stimulation, felt more or expressed more pain behavior than if, if they were alone. And given the same stimulus. So this was an example this was, um, this is an example of empathy, a very rudimentary form of empathy, but nonetheless, empathy. And science Actually, it was published, the article was published in Science. I was asked for comment on it. I don’t know why I think probably because my postdoc advisor refused to comment on it, and sent them to me something like that. And and I said, Well, this is emotional contagion. It’s not really empathy is it’s akin to when one baby cries in the nursery, all the babies cry, science, published that quip. And then Scientific American mind asked me for a blog entry. And they liked the blog entry. So they ended up publishing that in Scientific American mind as a commentary on on some on a longer piece by Friendster wall. So and then I never thought about empathy again, until late in, I believe it was late in 2007. When Inbal Ben-Ami Bartal, at that time, a graduate student in Jean Decety’s lab here at the University of Chicago, and now actually an assistant professor at University of Tel Aviv running her own lab. So Inbal approached me because she’s seen this quote, and thought I actually knew something about empathy, but I didn’t at the time.

HR:  

You’re very humble.

PM:  

And she says, you know, would you like to collaborate? I’m interested in that. I’ve been doing research on that on human empathy, which is Jean’s expertise. And I’m, I actually want to get back to rodents, I want to look at the biological basis of empathy. And I jumped at the chance because I always found this empathy, this, your ability to perceive pain without ever experiencing pain to be an incredible, incredibly interesting and attractive concept. So I said, Yeah, let’s, let’s talk and and, you know, within a couple weeks, she was in the lab and the three of us were doing this collaboration. And we ended up with this robust paradigm where one rat will help another rat who’s trapped and it’s, it’s a, it’s an arena that’s about a foot and a half square. And the the rat is foot and a half cube, actually, so the rat is a free rat is placed in there and the trap drive is placed in a plexi glass tube that we call the restrainer. That’s in place in the middle. And you know, the free rack can just ignore this trap rat. But what we found was that the free rat was very bothered by the trapped rat and bothered enough that they left the safety and attraction of the of the walls of the arena, which is where rodents like to be, to go into the center and and open the door for the trapped rat. And, you know, if they do that once, it’s kind of who cares. But the next day they did it again. And by the third day, they, they never missed it, you know, every once in a while somebody would a rat would do it once and not do it the next day. But once they’ve done it twice in a row, they invariably are over 98% of the time, they did it the third time, wow. And, and each time, each day that they did it, they did it at a shorter, shorter later latency. And we studied them over the course of 12 days and, and over the course of 12 days, they got down to a latency on the 12th day that was zero or very close to zero, they just get in there and open the door. So this is what we would call very reinforced behavior. And we we know more about that. Now we do know that it’s heavily reinforced, this is something and what gets reinforced, things that are enjoyable, things that are rewarding things that feel good. So that tells you a lot about how helping feels to a rat, and we can read into that feels to a mammal. So that’s that’s a big lesson. It’s a huge lesson you are not helping because you went to Sunday school or because you went to or…

HR:  

Because it makes you feel good.

PM:  

Yeah, you’re doing it because it feels good. And evolution has has allowed this to or evolution has advantaged this process because it not only feels good, but it or it feels good because it renders selective advantage to those that help they form a cohesive group.

HR:  

And I was just thinking myself, which you know, which parts of the brain are being used when they’re experiencing this and changing their activity.

PM:  

So Inbal just published a paper in the life that does the first deep dive into the brain pathways responsible for this behavior for the helping behavior. And most emphasized, and probably most important in this is, is that there’s activity and in fact, dopamine release that occurs in nucleus accumbens, that nucleus accumbens is of very, I would say, popular fame as the reward center. And, you know, I’m not, that’s not the articulation that is my favorite, my favorite would be that this is a place that, um, that biases you towards or away from certain movements and certain actions. So it biases you towards actions that, that in for one are better words that feel good, and that you then crave to do again because you want to feel good again. And it biases you away from actions that don’t have that beneficial effect. So, accumbens is involved in addictive behavior that animals including humans, exhibit towards drugs of abuse, heroin, alcohol, cocaine, etc. And so what what happens is that it that it feels good, and that motivates the animal to then want to seek to do that again. And that’s really what it’s not so much a state of nirvana, or a state of reward. It’s a state of craving. I want to feel that good. Again, it’s going to be a momentary feel good, but I want to get to that place again. So craving, I really think of accumbens as mediating craving more than anything else.

HR:  

Well, it’s probably has a lot to do with what makes social media tisk.

PM:  

Oh, 100%. The timing of of this is on the timescale and on the sort of cue to reward timescale that matches dopamine release beautifully.

HR:  

My favorite discussion I had with one of our neurodiverse interns who was autistic, and very, very smart and a lot smarter than I am. And I said, Look, I want you to learn how to when you go to an interview, remember that the person who’s interviewing you is going to be insecure like most people are, and you’re very, very smart. So why want you to smile, because that makes people relax and makes them feel good. And he told me just straight up, he says, I’m not doing that because it’s not authentic. And I say, Well, wait a minute. When you do something nice for somebody else, you make the happy chemicals, but also the other person gets it. So you’ll be making me happy by you smiling, and guess what you’ll use self will be happy. So he bought it.

PM:  

I mean, I think that’s it’s perfectly good advice. I would imagine, I would ask him, whether he can sustain it. So something because of the inauthenticity, essentially, I would bet that he has a hard time remembering to do it.

HR:  

I’m going to find out I’m going to I’m going to ask him that question.

PM:  

It’s a put on, it’s a you know, it’s it’s not coming from him. It’s an added thing. And it’s hard to make a habit of something that doesn’t actually…

HR:  

I don’t know, I don’t know, if it gets translated into becoming a rewiring of your brain. For instance, I was heard a podcast with this married couple, and the male was Asperger’s. And the female was neuro typical, if there is such a thing. And she was saying how, when she would get home from work, um, he wouldn’t say anything. And then she trained him kind of, why don’t you make a pot of tea and when I come home, we’ll have some tea. And you can ask me how my day was? And then I’ll tell you. And so she said, I’m just repeating what she said that he started to do it robotically. But then he actually became interested in what she was doing. So…

PM:  

Absolutely. The actually you can train people to do things. But if it is not something that comes from the self originally, you do have to train.

HR:  

Yes you do.

PM:  

It’s just, you know, somebody’s telling me, you should rob your right year, every time you enter the den, you know, or every time you enter your office, I’m never gonna remember that I don’t care about rubbing my right ear. Unless somebody is there every day, did you remember to rub your right ear?

HR:  

Or, or if rubbing your right ear makes the happy chemicals for you.

PM:  

Well, in that case, then you don’t need the reminder. You either need it to be authentic, it’s serving some internal, a reward for it’s feeding into internal pathways that make you crave to do it. Or you have to try you have to work and trained to do it. And you can with enough training, make it habitual enough. And in fact, that’s another thing that’s very remarkable. That’s remarkable about this helping behavior. And this is not published work. But Danny Levine, who’s a, who was a medical student is now a resident. I’m examined, at what point helping becomes a habit. And basically at the earliest point that we could tap that we did test it because it was already a habit. So let me explain what a habit is a habit is something that’s outcome independent. In other words, I shoot up heroin, and it feels really, really good. So the next day I shoot it up again, because I really crave that good warm feeling. And it feels good. And I do it a third day and a fourth day, by the 100th day, the 10th day maybe the you know, maybe the 10th day, certainly the 20th day, it doesn’t feel that good. It either feels neutral or it feels bad. Now I but I still do it. Why do I do it? Because it’s a habit. It has transferred from being dependent on that warm glowy feeling to being an action that is done habitually. Now habits are good because they’re fast. So when I brush my teeth, I use a ritual form of brushing my teeth, which is why I always laugh at these dentists. If you ever switched dentist and some new dentist tells you some new way to brush your teeth, you know, good luck. That’s not neurobiological. Not not neuro biologically accessible, not going to happen. we brush our teeth through habit. We’ve been doing it a million times it through our life. So, um, these rats, if we they’ll only open they’ll only learn to or develop the action of opening the restrain or if there’s a trap rat in there. But once they’ve done it twice in a row, if we now replace the restrainer with an empty the, the trap, the restraint or containing a trap trap replaced that with an empty restrainer. They still open, that is them expressing a habit. And that happens after two times. Wow. So you don’t form habits that easily for for incidental, mild, positive experiences. And I can tell you that they don’t form a habit anywhere, they don’t even get close to that kind of a habit for accessing chocolate. So helping another helping the trap rat out of that restrain or is more rewarding for our rats than is accessing chocolate.

HR:  

That’s great, you’ve given me optimism for the future.

PM:  

There’s a there’s a bad side to it too. 

HR:  

Which is? 

PM:  

Well, you are going to want to help. And you’re going to want to ascribe your actions — ascribe benefit to others to your actions. So you so I may say, you know, helping feel so good. I’m not it’s not a cognitive thing. But this is the is the TLDR to all teleology of it that I’m that I’m going to go help that person get in and out of the car. And that person may be a person that’s in a wheelchair that a person that looks older, and it may very well be that they don’t want your help. So you are feeding yourself because you what you’re you’re intending to help and you’re experiencing what your actions as a help and you’re getting the rewards from it. Regardless of whether it is construed as help by the receiver, and the receiver may find it intrusive, they might find it infantilizing. And fact they may not find it particularly helpful. So there’s a danger.

HR:  

I’m gonna do a segue to a just a slightly different topic here. Because I think it’ll be a part of it will have overlap with it. But, you are a passionate neuro-evangelist, which is the first time I’ve heard that term. 

PM:  

I coined it I think. 

HR:  

You did. And which aspect of everything you’re talking about, gave you the craving to like when a guy like me is looking at your notes and I I started taking your course error free course today, you know, and I, you know, what made you step up to the plate to do that.

PM:  

I love– for me, the neurobiology of life from the time I wake up to the time I go to sleep, there’s neurobiology, the hallway around I used to remember, we we spent a long time on this interaction between urination and pain. And, you know, so I learned a lot about bladder and bladder control. And, and it turns out that the bladder is a very interesting muscle that has that you can regulate the elasticity of it so that the it feels full at different volumes, depending on the elasticity of the muscle. When you wake up in the morning, it’s that five minutes before you wake up and at five minutes after you wake up the volume is basically the same. And yet at one moment, it feels intolerable and another moment you’re able to sleep through it and no problem. And I used to experience this as my cat my cat would be haunt me in a bit of course. I don’t know. I am a very cat person. So if a cat is on me, I can’t move because I don’t know that I just can’t I and so you know, I would just feel that I would feel my bladder get modulated where the volume appear to expand and expand. I knew it was just it’s just in your brain. it’s um it’s it’s not you know, it’s a it’s a matter of the central or a matter of the nervous system. I should say. Not so much of the volume. And, and I like just thinking about how how neurobiology comes in at every moment of the day, um, from the time I wake up to the time I go to sleep, when the opportunity came, when, when the University of Chicago approached me to do a Coursera course, very quickly, I realized that this was an opportunity of what I would call and what Roy Weiss who got me into this called educational social justice. So this is providing information and educational resources to individuals, no matter where they are, how much money they have, whether they can travel to the Chicago, whether they can pass an entrance exam, none of that matters, what age they are, none of that matters. If they can get an internet connection, they can access this information. And, you know, I don’t get that many chances to do good, um, as a professor of teaching up to I’d say, you know, up to 100 people at a time. Normally, um, and this is the ability to potentially reach 1000s. And I’ve reached, you know, over 300,000 using this.

HR:  

How cool is that? It’s so cool.

PM:  

Yeah, it’s great. And, you know, there there, there are other Coursera courses that we reach many more. But But I’m pleased, I’m pleased, and I and it’s a weird thing Hackie. Because we have a there is a sense of community, or I feel a sense of community, perhaps it’s a false sense of community, but I feel it, as do others that are that have taken the course. 

HR:  

Well, your style is very Matter of fact engaging. You know, I just watched a couple of milk quick. So I compliment you on that. Tell us how neurobiology how you correlate that with neurodiversity with all of our different kinds of brains, you know, from, like, you had a little bit of a seizure, there’s autism, there’s Alzheimer’s, there is PTSD, there are all these overlapping. It’s just in my concept of neurodiversity. I put everything under one roof with different brains, the mental health issues, the neurology issues, and the neuro diversity and developmental learning differences are all there so I can get the different silos talking to each other. But how do you see how do you see it as applies to, but I’ll call it for lack of a better term, standard neurodiversity terms are labels, you know, like, people mistakenly say, for instance, those with autism lack empathy, which has been shown to not be true. And I’m wondering if you had any thoughts on on that.

PM:  

I’ll be honest, that I haven’t thought deeply about neurodiversity. I’m, I’m still I find it interesting. I, in general, don’t take into individuals as types. I take individuals as individuals. So I don’t think that we’re particularly good at explaining why. And let’s say in 100, patients with Parkinson’s disease, and Parkinson’s is is it? Parkinson’s is a good example because it’s an actual disease where it’s probably either one entity or just a few entities, it really is a thing. It’s a correctly reified thing. But one individuals starts with a tremor another one starts with a great you know, a Brady kinesia, another one starts with an A kinesia, one starts in the hand, one starts in the left leg, another one starts you know, in the mouth, what, whatever, and how do we how to how does neurobiology or neurology for that matter do at explaining those individual differences? I’d give us an F. You know, it’s an F. So that’s why what physicians are good at and what scientists are decent that is to explain the population that does know that does no good. For on for an individual. And, you know, the best. The best approach to this conundrum that I’ve ever seen, or I’ve ever heard of was an individual who told me about, um, a mother who told me about her daughter who had a very, very unusual, Uber rare condition. And the physician said, you know, I’m an expert in this category of neurological issues, but you’re the expert in your daughter. If we work together, we can we can accomplish where we can get to where we need to go. But neither one of us alone is going to make it. And that to me is, um, I like that approach. I think that that that’s the that’s the kind of physician that I would love to have if if I were in such a such a situation. And then the question is, are we all in that situation? Are we all so different and unique? Are we such? Are we splitters, and if we’re enough splitters versus lumpers, is that the human condition period? In which case, it’s a situation where physicians need to work with individuals anyway. And to be fair, I think that is the attitude of most physicians, which is everything disappears and it’s the person in front of you that’s what they’re talking about. That’s who they’re that’s who they’re dealing with. They’re dealing with the problems desires needs of the individual that they see in front of them and bringing into bear all this other population information.

HR:  

How can people learn more about you?

PM:   

I’m on Twitter as neuromooc. N E U R O M O O C. I have a blog that’s called thebrainissocool.com. That’s two s’s — the brain is so cool. Um, and what else? You know, if you track down my U of Chicago address I’ll talk back to you. I’m not gonna give it out, but if you track it down, and you’re motivated, 

HR:  

And your Coursera course.

PM:  

My Coursera course is free to everyone. They’re going to try to make you pay for a certificate, but you don’t have to do that.

HR:  

Why should people be interested neurobiology?

PM:  

People should be interested in neurobiology because you are just a neurobiological animal. That’s all you are no more, no less.

HR:  

So on that note, Dr. Peggy Mason, Professor Mason at the University of Chicago neurobiologist extraordinaire, thank you so much for being with us here at Different Brains. 

PM:  

Thank you.