Self Comes to Mind

between admiration and compassion.
    The likely explanation for this beautiful result comes from the different allegiances that the two parts of the PMC hold, in the brain of each subject, relative to the subject’s own body. One sector relates closely to musculoskeletal aspects, the other to the very interior of the body, that is, to the internal milieu and viscera. The attentive reader will probably have guessed which goes with which. The physicality feature (skill, physical pain) goes with the musculoskeletal-related component. The mental feature (mental pain, virtue) goes with the internal milieu and viscera. Would you have it any other way?
    There was one more hypothesis and one more result of note. We hypothesized that compassion for physical pain, being an evolutionarily older brain response—it is clearly present in several nonhuman species—should be processed faster by the brain than compassion for mental pain, something that requires the more complicated processing of a less immediately obvious predicament and that is likely to involve a wider compass of knowledge.
    The results confirmed the hypothesis. Compassion for physical pain evokes faster responses in the insular cortex than does compassion for mental pain. The responses to physical pain not only rise faster but dissipate faster. The responses to mental pain take longer to establish themselves, but they also take longer to dissipate.
    Despite the preliminary nature of this study, we have an initial glimpse of how the brain processes admiration and compassion. Predictably, the root of these processes runs deep in the brain and in the flesh. Also predictably, these processes are greatly affected by individual experience. All true, through and through, as it should be, for all emotions.

6
An Architecture for Memory
     
Somehow, Somewhere
     
    “Will any of us ever see a train pulling out without hearing a few shots?” Dick Diver, the main character in Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night , asks his entourage as they wave good-bye to their friend Abe North in the Paris morning. Diver and company have just witnessed the unexpected: a desperate young woman has pulled a little pearl revolver from her purse and shot down her lover as the departing train whistled out of the Gare St. Lazare.
    Diver’s question is an evocative reminder of our brain’s spectacular ability to learn composite information and reproduce it later, whether or not we wish it to, with considerable fidelity and from a variety of perspectives. Diver and company will forever come into train stations and hear imaginary shots in their minds, in a fainter but recognizable approximation of the sounds heard that morning, in an unwilled attempt to reproduce the auditory images experienced that morning. And because composite memories of events can be recalled from the representation of any of the parts that composed the event, they may also hear the shots when someone simply mentions departing trains, in any setting, not just when they see trains pulling out of stations, and they may also hear the shots when someone mentions Abe North (they were there because of him) or the Gare St. Lazare (that was where it occurred). This is also what happens to those who have been in a war zone and forever relive the sounds and sights of battle in haunting, unwanted flashbacks. Post-traumatic stress syndrome is the unwelcome side effect of an otherwise splendid ability.
    It generally helps, as in this story, that the event to be remembered is emotionally salient, that it jitters the value scales. Provided that a scene has some value, provided that enough emotion was present at the time, the brain will learn multimedia sights, sounds, touches, feels, smells, and the like and will bring them back on cue. In time, the recall may grow faint. In time and with the imagination of a fabulist, the material may be embroidered upon, chopped to pieces, and recombined in a novel or screenplay. Step by step, what began as filmic nonverbal images may even morph into a fragmentary verbal account, remembered as much for the words in the tale as for the visual and auditory elements.
    Now consider the marvel that is recall, and think of the resources the brain must possess to produce it. Beyond perceptual images in varied sensory domains, the brain must have a way of storing the respective patterns, somehow, somewhere, and must retain a path to retrieve the patterns, somehow, somewhere, for the attempted reproduction