Opening
ourselves up to full collaboration and the possibility of tapping
co-intelligence means shifting our paradigm on what it means to be human. We’re
not as bad as we’ve been taught to think we are.
One
place to start is with the research pouring out of universities and institutes
around the world showing that humans are just as prone to goodness and
cooperation as we are to defensiveness and aggression. In fact, our
species depends on cooperation, which requires a certain level of empathy and
compassion for others.
Recent
compassion studies argue persuasively for this take on human nature, one that
rejects the idea of the preeminence of self-interest. The research supports the
idea that emotions are rational, functional and adaptive and are a part of the
brain as it has evolved to date.
In
his research, Dacher Keltner has focused on the manifestations of compassion
and how it shows up physically and neurophysiologically. Using MRI
technology, Keltner and others* have found significant evidence that compassion
has a biologically correlated process that involves the brain and the vagus
nervous system. Their research suggests that compassion most likely
enabled early humans to come together in communities and develop cooperative
skills as hunter/gatherers, thereby ensuring their survival and evolution.
*Dacher Keltner Jeremy Adam Smith, and Jason Marsh in The Compassionate Instinct: The Science of
Human Goodness, WW Norton, New York
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