Self Comes to Mind

more basic emotions, such as fear, happiness, and sadness? Are they different? Social emotions seem so dependent on the environment in which one develops, so linked to educational factors, that they may seem a mere cognitive veneer applied lightly to the brain’s surface. Also, it is important to examine how processing such emotions and feelings, which clearly involves the self of the beholder, engages, or does not, the brain structures that we have begun to associate with self states.
    I set out to answer these questions with Hanna Damasio and with Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, whose consuming interest is the marriage of neuroscience and education and who was, for that very reason, attracted to this problem. We envisioned a study in which we would investigate, using functional magnetic resonance imaging, how stories can induce, in normal human beings, feelings of either admiration or compassion. We wanted to generate responses of admiration or compassion evoked by certain kinds of behavior, displayed in a narrative. We were not interested in having the experimental subjects recognize admiration or compassion when they witnessed them in someone else. We wanted the subjects to experience those emotions. From the beginning we knew that we wanted at least four distinct conditions, two for admiration, two for compassion. The admiration conditions were either admiration for virtuous acts (the admirable virtue of a great act of generosity) or admiration for acts of virtuosity (those of spectacular athletes or amazing musical soloists, for example). The compassion conditions, on the other hand, included compassion for physical pain (what one feels for the hapless victim of a street accident) and compassion for mental and social predicaments (what one feels for a person who lost his home in a fire, or lost her loved one to an incomprehensible disease).
    The contrasts were very clear, all the more so once Mary Helen inventively assembled real stories along with an effective method to administer them to willing subjects in a functional imaging experiment. 12
    We tested three hypotheses. The first hypothesis had to do with the regions engaged by feeling admiration and compassion. The upshot of the experiment was unequivocal: the regions engaged were, by and large, the same as those engaged by the allegedly pedestrian basic emotions. The insula was alight in force, as was the anterior cingulate cortex, in all conditions. Upper-brain-stem regions were involved as well, as predicted.
    This result certainly gave the lie to the idea that social emotions would not engage the machinery of life regulation to the same extent as their basic counterparts. The brain engagement ran deep, in keeping with the fact that our experiences of such emotions are deeply marked by body events. Jonathan Haidt’s behavioral work on the processing of comparable social emotions reveals quite clearly how the body is engaged in such situations. 13
    The second hypothesis we tested concerned the central theme of this book: self and consciousness. We found that feeling these emotions engaged the posteromedial cortices (PMCs), a region we believe plays a role in constructing the self. This is in keeping with the fact that the subject’s reaction to any of the stimulus stories required the person to become a full spectator and judge of the situation, a full empathizer with the protagonist’s predicament, in the cases of compassion, and a potential prospective emulator of the protagonist’s good deed, in the case of admiration.
    We also found something we did not predict: the part of the PMCs that was most active in situations of admiration for skill and compassion for physical pain was quite distinct from the part of the PMCs that was most engaged by admiration for virtuous acts and compassion for mental pain. The split was striking, so much so that the PMC activity pattern related to one pair of emotions literally fit the PMC pattern related to the other, much like a missing piece in a puzzle.
    The shared feature of one pair of conditions—skill and physical pain—was the involvement of the body in its external, action-oriented aspects. The shared feature of the other pair of conditions—the psychological pain of suffering and the virtuous act—was a mental state. The PMC result told us that the brain had recognized these shared features—physicality in one pair, mental states in the other—and paid them far more heed than the elementary contrast