DARWIN CONSIDERED empathy or compassion to be our strongest
instinct, one that launched the success of the human species. By
taking good care of each other, we thrived through long childhoods,
sicknesses and food shortages. Berkeley’s Keltner argues we possess
a literal seat of empathy: the body’s vagus nerve. It starts on top of
the spinal cord and tentacles out to facial muscles, the heart, lungs
and digestive organs. A key switch in our parasympathetic nervous
system, the vagus slows down our heart rate after a fright, bringing us
back to a place of conciliation rather than aggression. It appears
connected to our oxytocin receptors, which regulate the
neurotransmitter that is sometimes reductively called the love
hormone, since it flows during sex and breastfeeding. During the
release of oxytocin, the vagus nerve may trigger an electric, humming
sensation in the upper back. It’s like getting electrocuted by love.
As it responds to love, posits Keltner, the vagus nerve also
responds to awe. To get a better handle on how it may work, Keltner
and Craig Anderson, his graduate student at Berkeley, invited me (and
a whole lot of research subjects) to sit down and watch some of the
most awesome video footage they could find—the earth from outer
space. This is the view that caused astronauts to fill with tenderness
for their little marble in the sky and all of humanity on it. This
sensation may be close to what Buddhists describe as the unity of
Nirvana, a transcendent happiness characterized by outward love and
the elimination of desire.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t approaching Nirvana while watching the
earth-from-space footage on a smallish video monitor in a utilitarian
lab at Tolman Hall. Anderson had me strap on a heart-rate monitor,
and then he attached sensors to my finger for measuring skin
conductance (sweating, another measure of the autonomic nervous
system). He launched that video, followed by one of magnificent
mountain summits, and after ten minutes or so, he returned with my