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An eagle family in Iowa.
Like many thousands of people, this spring we found ourselves obsessively watching a pair of eagles raise their young. Actually, we felt a bit like peeping toms, as if the video cam positioned by their nest in Decorah, Iowa intruded on a fundamental privacy. In some raw way, we felt as if the birds were like us. Day after day, in fact, we caught ourselves responding emotionally to the trials and tribulations of eagle life. And we found ourselves smack dab in the middle of the empathizing dilemma.
Empathizing is a critical imaginative skill, one of the thinking tools we discuss in Sparks of Genius as common to creative individuals across the arts and sciences, in any and every kind of work. First and foremost, empathizing involves recognizing the emotional state of other people, putting yourself in their place, seeing the world through their eyes. Actors, for instance, empathize whenever they "become" the character they portray. And their techniques are often obvious. The great thespian Konstantin Stanislavsky said "I only had to assume [a character's] manners and habits, even off the stage, and in my soul there were born the feelings and perceptions that had given them birth..." (1)
Empathy shows up in the imaginative thinking of other arts and of the sciences, too. The sculptor Isamu Noguchi wanted to achieve empathic understanding - in his case with inanimate materials and forms. "Go ahead," he told gallery visitors during exhibits of a piece called "Core". "Put your head into it, then you will know what the inside of a stone feels like." (1) Nobel laureate Barbara
A chromosome.
McClintock developed a similar "feeling for the organism" when studying corn chromosomes through the microscope. "When I was really working with them," she said, "I wasn't outside, I was down there [with the genes]... these were my friends... As you look at these things, they become part of you. And you forget yourself." (1)
In all three of these examples, empathizing involves a Zen-like "becoming of the thing" you study, an integration of 'I' and 'other'. It involves our capacity to experience for ourselves the emotional valence of behaviors and processes we see at some remove. Stories, drawings, music and other arts have been exploiting the capacity for thousands of years. In the last few decades, neuroscience has confirmed that the brain has "intricate circuitry for understanding other people's thoughts and feelings." (2) To see a picture of someone stubbing their toe is to activate areas of brain involved when you stub your own toe. Says Michael Gazzaniga, a veteran founder of cognitive neuroscience, "When I have an empathetic moment, I literally feel your pain." (2) I also, implicitly, theorize that you have a mind like mine.
And herein lay our empathizing dilemma with the eagles. We were aggrieved when the parent eagle (apparently) ignored the piteous chirping of the smallest eaglet. We were shocked when the largest eaglet (apparently) tried to push the other two out of the nest. We could feel the smallest eagles' pain; didn't the parent eagle, too? Asking such a question brought us right up against the otherness between 'us' and 'them'. Most people readily accept that sharing the same basic neurocircuitry, all human beings also share the same consciousness. Far fewer people accept that our empathic response to animals means they, too, have an emotional mind. Were we placing ourselves in the role of the eagle, or were we rather placing the eagle in the role of ourselves? Is inter-species empathizing even possible?
Well, yes, it is. Recent advance in the sciences of animal behavior have been built on careful recognition of empathic response, both in ourselves and in the animals we study. Ethologists such as Franz de Waal have explored the capacity for empathy in social animals such as chimpanzees. And Shirley Strum, renowned for her study of baboons in the wild, writes that her own intense interest in and identification with one animal in particular was the key to the insights she gained into baboon society: "Peggy [the baboon] taught me that you can have strong emotions, such as the special attachment I felt for her, and still do good science. The two were not, as I had once thought, mutually exclusive...Emotions need not overwhelm science. Techniques could still be put on a firm quantitative footing. Best of all, feeling strongly about the baboons made the science more rewarding." (1)
The trick to inter-species empathizing is to avoid anthropomorphism, the projection of a human mind on the animal. The trick to extra-human empathizing is to cultivate an empathic rigor, in which we use the behavior of the animal (or the chromosome or the stone) to understand how it is responding to the world, rather than projecting our consciousness onto it. The object is not to endow the 'other' with our feelings but to gain a new perspective on how to feel like the 'other'.
Us or them? Two eaglets.
There's a lesson here, and it goes way beyond our relationship with eagles, in real environments or cyberspace. If our capacity to empathize is hardwired in the brain, our interpretation of our empathic experience can be trained to many purposes. In science, but also in the arts and the humanities, in politics and in schooling, we can learn not to assume that others are just like us, whether people, birds, chromosomes or stones. Truly empathizing with the eagles pushes us beyond our own mind and manners, broadening the ways we understand being and experience.
Imagine That! What it would be like to live without words. Could you still make decisions? Have concepts of fairness? Respond to the needs of others? Behave responsibly? Watch an animal-cam and empathize!
(c) Michele and Robert Root-Bernstein 2011
Sources
(1) Root-Bernstein, Robert & Michele. 1999. Sparks of Genius, The 13 Thinking Tools of the World's Most Creative People. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin).
(2) Zimmer, Carl. (May 10, 2005). A Career Spent Learning How the Mind Emerges From the Brain. The New York Times. Available @ http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/10/science/10prof.html?pagewanted=print
