The objectives of this course are: -To introduce participants to different concepts of love, to empower them to be conscious of the power of love and the possibility of practicing it in everyday life, and to highlight in particular the idea of love as a force for social justice. -To communicate a sense of personal strength and empowerment by actively learning from each other and beginning to define how participants can apply their learning in service to society. This course will explore the concept of agape love (compassion/kindness) as a force for social justice and action and as the inspiration for service and the application of knowledge to positive social change. Biological, psychological, religious, and social perspectives of love will be discussed, drawing on the expertise of people from a variety of disciplines. During the six-week course, the following topics will be raised and discussed: kinds of love/defining love; non-violent communication; love and the biology of the brain; love as a basic concept of religious and ethical beliefs (e.g., Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Gandhian); love applied in action, and poetic expressions of love as a social force. This curriculum aims to foster a sense of the importance of love as a key phenomenon in creating community, connection, and functional societies among humans. Course materials will draw from a variety of sources. One of the goals of the class is to provide participants with some knowledge of the literature of love, and readings for the course are listed in the outline of the course on the pages that follow.
Video: Ryan York in Conversation with Anne
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Del curso dictado por Stanford University
Love as a Force for Social Justice
82 calificaciones
Conoce a los instructores
Anne Firth Murray
Well, I'm very happy to welcome Ryan York here for a conversation about the brain.
And how decisions are made and especially what happens when people are feeling love.
Now this class is about compassion and kindness, that kind of love,
agape love, but I think people would be interested also, to hear a little bit
about what happens in the brain when people feel other kinds of love.
>> Sure.
Neuroscience now kind of understands at least in humans that, say, so the most
studied and a form of love that people have looked at is romantic relationships.
And there's kind of a general model that's coming out
that shows two stages of this type of love.
The first being very romantic where you're kind of obsessed with the other person and
that tends to elicit a lot of activity from parts of your brain that are involved
in, that kind of overlap with addictive behaviors and kind of obsessive thoughts.
And it releases certain types of neurotransmitters that you may have heard
of called dopamine.
And it also will make your peripheral nervous system very active, so
you're very excited to try to find that person.
And that generally will lead to the more
pleasant feelings that people experience when they're falling in love.
And there's a lot of studies that have been
conducted looking at the activity of the brain when people are in this state and
find really unique patterns of activity associated with that.
And in the second stage, as the relationship tends to settle down and
become more secure, it'll transition into
a different type of stable love that might be more similar to this type of agape or
compassionate love that the course is concerned with, where there it's more.
And this is very generally speaking, it's defined by releases
of chemicals in your brain called oxytocin, vasopressin.
These are things that tend to promote pair bonding, affiliative behavior,
a feeling of connectedness with this person.
And from perspective of the actual parts of your brain that are working in that
case it tends to shift from the original stage where the portions
of your brain that are more involved in kind of the sensation of your body.
And goal directed behavior are transferred into these more
kind of top down control processes from the front of your brain,
the cortex it's called, that will then modulate those desires and
instead promote behaviors that tend to be more in recognition of the other person.
So those are kind of the two stages that neuroscientists now,
at least in humans, recognize.
>> One time, I had a neuroscientist visit my class.
And he said, the brain is built for love.
If you have perfect connection in the brain, then it's healthy, I guess.
And he, I think, considered love perfect connection.
That's how he defined it really, thoughts.
>> Yeah, so for humans, we are so social and it's so important for us to
be in stable relationships and to have a place within our social communities.
That it seems to definitely have health benefits, not only in the functioning
of your brain, but potentially even over time, the structure of it.
So there is work now, too, that supports the idea that certain
types of meditation that benefit cultivating compassion and
loving kindness can actually increase the gray matter in your brain.
So this is the kind of more processing component of your brain.
So there's definitely volumes of evidence out there that having stable,
positive, loving social relationships benefits the brain.
>> I think what he meant was connection.
And that question of connection is your connection love.
But I wanted to have a little fun and hear what your research, and
how you came to be able to make the transition between the research you do and
the things that we've just been talking about.
>> Yeah, sure, so what I study is love in a very abstracted sense
because it's much more basic and it's studying courtship and
mating behaviors in very social fish.
>> [LAUGH] >> So unlike humans, these fish don't form
stable bonds, they don't form very complex lasting social relationships.
But they do put a very, very large amount of effort into attracting one another for
the purpose of producing offspring.
And what makes it interesting is that for whatever reason, these behaviors,
evolutionarily speaking, tend to be very unique
in the biology that's underlying them, the genes that are involved in them.
And they tend to vary greatly if you look at multiple species across species.
So two closely related species may have totally different ways of mating.
The males will build little sand castles to attract females, and
each species has its unique way of doing it.
So it could be that males in one species will make a really
large sand castle with some turrets around it.
There could be another species digs out a big pit.
And the females respond to this and they mate,
if the males make it in a way that's satisfying the females, they will mate.
And therefore, the males will be able to pass on their genes and
biologic confirmation to the next generation.
But so what we found actually is that if you go in and
look at the genomes of these fish, so if you look across all the genes that they
have, the way that they differ from each other is actually the way that
humans tend to differ when you look at neuropsychiatric disorders.
It tends to be very complex in terms of the amount of genes that are involved.
So it suggests that when you see changes in behavior,
not just necessarily reproductive behavior, but
kind of more broadly within populations or across time it tends to be similar.
Not only when you look amongst humans, but other animals as well.
So we're starting to get a kind of more general picture of what to expect when you
try to understand the biological bases of these things.
>> And one quick question and then I'd like to go back to humans and their brain.
And that is have you come to have the answers to those questions that
indeed there is this kind of diversity in human brains?
>> So you could think about pretty easily how in fish potentially
the complexity of their brain to process these kind of signals of courtship,
or even if you want to be loose with the language of love,
it could become more complex over time to that selection.
It's interesting to think about in humans then, because there are hypotheses out
there that the human brain and the more specific traits we have, such as language,
complex cognition, even consciousness are products of this process, too.
And that for whatever reason, they came about because females liked males who
were able to whisper more complex poetry [LAUGH] or handle more complex problems.
And that is actually a leading theory of why the human brain evolved so fast.
Because it was in only, as far as we can tell, maybe I think within
the last several tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years,
that we started showing this incredible behavioral complexity.
So the question is how could that happen so quickly?
One of the answers that's convenient for
that is that potentially it's sexual selection because elsewhere in nature we
know that that is an evolutionary process that can make change happen very rapidly.
So that is a neat hypothesis to think about with humans.
It'll be very interesting if more data come out to support that over time.
>> Anything else you felt like saying, particularly relating it, I hope,
to agape love?
because I don't want to get too far away from it.
>> Sure, sure.
Yeah, I think there's evidence, I mean so evolutionary biologists like to explain
altruism from a genetic relatedness perspective.
That when you see it, it tends to be because you're living in a community where
everybody is somewhat related to each other.
So it benefits you to help save some other member if they're your cousin.
And the amount of effort you'll put into it,
people theorize scales with the amount of relatedness.
So the question is, why in humans would we do that for people we're not related to?
And it seems like it is likely related to the expansion of cognitive
ability we have, that we have the ability to not only reason about
other people but somehow elicit an empathic response in us.
So it's not just necessarily hardwired that we're going to try to only save
the people in our family.
But instead for whatever reason, we tend to have kind of
a more general purpose mechanism where we're able to, not everybody does.
But at least we're capable of cultivating a sense of affiliation or agape love for
members of our community that, in kind of a strict evolutionary biological sense,
we shouldn't necessarily feel that for.
And I don't know if that's so rare.
There is increasing evidence in other primates that this can happen.
And it kind of goes against the idea that it's solely a genetic question.
And it could be more complex about social behavior.
If you are able to reason about social behavior, and
it benefits you as a community to be affiliated with each other,
to feel some sense of connection, that in itself can evolve and persist.
But yeah, definitely the question of altruism is, the jury's still out I think
scientifically [LAUGH] in that sense of- >> And the big question for
me from what you just said is it's one thing to feel empathy and
maybe be capable because of our brains or whatever to feel empathy, but it's another
thing to go the next step to compassion, which is to actually do something.
And hopefully that can be trained.
>> Yeah, yeah, because yeah, I mean,
I think a lot of interesting work is being done now with dogs.
That's actually kind of a unique area that might relate to this.
Because in a way dogs are this interesting experiment in evolution where
we've selected for traits that make them more and
more not necessarily like us, but capable of understanding us.
So there have been some recent publications showing that dogs can
recognize a very large number of human emotions.
They're very sensitive to the tone of your voice and
are pretty much constantly reading people's behavior.
And actually, so this is a really interesting case where two species have
created this relationship.
And to a certain extent, dogs almost develop the ability to feel,
using these words is kind of difficult, but something like empathy or
compassion for another species, and provide that, almost, service for us.
So that is another really interesting place to think about that.
It's not necessarily limited to humans, that there's capacities for
this in other animals.
>> And have people been looking at dogs' brains-
>> They have,
they actually stick the dogs in big scanners-
>> And observing changes?
>> Yeah, and yeah, there's actually pretty funny pictures that will come out of
those experiments too.
[LAUGH] You'll see a dog coming out of an MRI machine-
>> [LAUGH]
>> And just having been imaged.
But yeah, so we're starting to get a sense, too,
what's going on in the dog brain while they are thinking about humans.
>> Well, back to humans and the point that maybe we can teach,
by exercising the brain, more compassion and
kindness among people, that's kind of my interest.
Comments about that?
>> Meditators, or people who practice prayer,
certain types of contemplation like that, over time, can actually
produce pretty large scale changes in the connectivity of your brain and
the overall makeup of certain portions of your brain.
And that actually, if you look at long-term practitioners of these, so if
you bring in a Tibetan Buddhist monk who's practiced loving kindness meditation for
decades, their brain will look substantially different from others.
And what really is going on there is you're actually strengthening,
where there's evidence to suggest that you're strengthening the connections in
the brain that are the same ones that tend to come online or
are more active as you transition from, like I was mentioning earlier,
the initial erotic stages of a relationship to the more stable,
compassionate, potentially bonded stages of a relationship.
These kind of top down control of yourself type connections
that are being preferentially strengthened.
So that's not exactly love changing the brain, but
they are practices that promote a way of being in the world that might
allow you to feel greater affiliative emotions toward others, and
maybe a lot of the emotions that would overlap with this sense of agape love.
>> Mm-hm, well, there's a quote from Gandhi that goes something like,
love between individuals is a prerequisite to peace between nations.
And this reminds me of that.
If we have enough people who are feeling and
behaving in the context of love maybe we can move toward a more peaceful world?
>> Yeah, and it does seem like this is the case, if you in some way
could almost help yourself out by changing your biology for that.
So by doing some kind of practice that allows your brain to be more predisposed
to acting one way or the other, maybe that would be a really nice thing, yeah.
[LAUGH] >> Thanks very much.
>> Yeah, you, too. >> Ryan, thank you.
>> Yeah.
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