The Empathetic Funambulist

Wednesday, May 6th, 2020 - NewsPoem
Empathy Primordial Traits, Altruism Primordial Traits, Empathy and Altruism Primordial Traits, Empathy, Altruism, Peter Sterling, University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, What Is Health, Peter Sterling What is Health,
Scientists are looking for a reason why humans are sometimes inclined to be more or less self-sacrificing as a result of having more or less altruism and/or empathy. They’ve come up with some possible chemical potentials and evolutionary understandings of the usefulness or un-usefulness of this or that measure of empathies or altruisms, but, in the end, they’ve come to understand the usefulness of the dialectical conflicts of more or less empathies or altruisms.
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Excerpt from www.popsci.com
Why we evolved to feel empathy during pandemics and other disasters
Empathy and altruism are primordial human traits. When we wandered as foragers for 200,000 years, resources were iffy. So we smoothed out potentially fatal fluctuations by elaborating our instinct to share. But we didn’t invent these circuits: A free rat, encountering a trapped rat, will make an effort to release it. And a rat, pulling a lever to obtain food pellets, will choose the lever that doesn’t shock a stranger rat, even when that lever delivers two times less food. Thus neural circuits for empathy and altruism have likely been around since our last shared ancestor with rodents—nearly 100 million years….
Empathy has a substantial genetic contribution, about half as much as height, a group of researchers found in 2018. Inevitably, some individuals inherit more pro-empathy genes than average….
But why, since we evolved brain circuits for empathy, should any of us be deficient for this trait? Why can’t we all be above average? Apparently, because our species’ success gains from individuals on both sides of the bell curve.
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News Curated by PioneeringNews.com
The Empathetic Funambulist
Empathy.
The genetic tremor.
The pause.
The awe and wonder as life sacrifices itself for life.
Empathy.
Entering into the fray, imagined, become, parted with self to satisfy other, the altruist lining itself
on a tightrope of right.
Right, I said, good and decent.
The umbrella spins above its head. The crowd below spits into its spittoons, aghast at the great height
of the lone, slicing line, from wence, wence, wence
the tiny itself dangled in right, moving forward on a turn of pencil-thin tire attached to an oversized bicycle you peddled across the line with,
the empathetic divide,
the dancing on the seat as you juggle flames of bowling pins, unbothered, balanced, empathetic….
Empathy.
The after-party centers around your sacrifice, at the height of the show,
The model departs the seat, akimbo’d in pre-planned terror, accepting the fall, the tumult of the blades below where the body lands,
Gone,
But not forgotten. Life sacrifices itself for life, for the smiles, for the joys, for the awes of the spittoon-spitting crowd below, temporarily enthralled with your dizzying display that defied logic and reason itself.
I want to say this is the end, but I lie. We’ll do this again, ghosts will scratch dirt and find bone with a bit of struggle reflecting aid, reflecting sacrifice, reflecting ‘empathy,’ that tenuous hold on the slip of the tightrope’s foundation. And we’ll marvel again at the nobility of savages, and we’ll reinvent the forms that our empathetic performers get to take, for the sake of the show.
The show, my friends, must go on. Do you feel me? If so, climb upon this ladder, there, there, the stage is worth the end alone.
http://freeqo.com/2020/05/06/the-empathetic-funambulist/