Metta Data: New Research on How Compassion Works

Tania Singer, a director at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, is a founder of the field of social neuroscience, a branch of neurosciences which seeks to understand how biological systems relate to social processes and behavior.  Enormously influential in that field, she’s also a meditation practitioner, and her recent work focuses on researching compassion and meditation in ways that will gain wider credibility with scientists.  She’s studying the distinct ways compassion functions in the brain, how people can be trained to hone compassion, and how that can condition pro-social behavior. Featured in a recent article in the journal Science, Singer’s ReSource Project uses magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to look for a “compassion signature” in the brain.