devices that require repair. This allows for cool-headed, rational, and skillful surgeries, while fe

devices that require repair. This allows for cool-headed, rational, and skillful surgeries, while fending off the humanizing emotions of compassion and empathy. This is adaptive. This is a transformation that enables doctors working in war-torn areas or regions afflicted with a disease outbreak, to treat hundreds of suffering patients as if they were treating inert cars on an assembly line. Good doctors allow their compassion and empathy to return as their patients regain awareness. Bad doctors maintain their cool, detached manner, insensitive to the physical and psychological pain of their waking patients. Bad doctors continue to perceive their patients like cars on the assembly line. Really bad doctors see their patients like cars that were created for personal R&D. Recall from earlier sections that when we see someone else in pain, particular areas of the brain activate as we imagine their suffering. Many of the same areas of the brain also activate when we personally experience pain. This is the circuitry for pain empathy. The French cognitive neuroscientist Jean Decety showed that when physicians look at video clips of people experiencing pain from a needle prick, this circuit is suppressed relative to non-physicians. For physicians, it’s as if they were watching a needle prick a pillow. Though we don’t know how much experience was necessary or sufficient to cause the physician’s lack of pain empathy, or the extent to which physicians are physicians because they were born with less empathy, Decety’s findings point to individual differences in our capacity to feel what others feel and the potential modulating role of experience. Several studies now show that based on individual experience, the human brain readily flip-flops between empathy and callousness. In two similarly designed experiments, one recording from pain related areas in the brain, and the other from a motor area associated with the hand, Caucasian and Black subjects watched a video of a needle penetrating a human hand. Consistently, subjects showed weaker activation in the pain and motor areas when watching the needle penetrate the hand from another race. This lowering of pain empathy and motor response for the out-group was greatest for subjects with the highest implicit or unconscious racial biases, as measured with the IAT tool noted earlier. These studies of the brain, like the behavioral studies I discussed earlier, add to the idea that we have a racial bias for pain empathy. We feel others’ pain, but only for those who share the same race. But since, by definition, we look more like those from within our racial group than those outside it, perhaps the bias is less about race and more about those that don’t look like us. To explore this possibility, Black and Caucasian subjects saw a needle penetrate a violet-colored hand. Violet hands are not only different, but far more different than either black or white hands in terms of our experience of skin coloration. Nonetheless, the activation pattern in the brain matched the subject’s own race. When we feel less compassion for someone of another race, it is because of racial biases, not because of superficial differences in appearance. Color is simply a cue that reminds us of our prejudice. Hauser Chapter 3. Ravages of denial 104 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_012850