Luke’s $10k A Week Blog

In Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn series, characters have various powers, fueled by metal. Those who use the power of brass are called Rioters, because they can increase the intensity of others’ emotions, whereas those who use zinc are called Soothers, and can reduce the intensity of specific emotions.

While we can’t influence the emotions of others, we can influence our own emotions. In a sense, we are able to both soothe and riot specific emotions in ourselves to a limited degree.

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Some people are apparently born heartless. They focus so hard on their own ego that they don’t have a clue how to treat others. Some of them are the most wealthy in the world. Jon writes:

Frequently, they’ll:

• Leave behind a trail of broken marriages and forgotten children
• Lose the life savings of their friends and relatives on an ingenious but doomed business
• Refuse to lend anyone money or give to charity
• Avoid unnecessary expenses to the point of miserliness
• Treat everyone that can’t help them as if they’re expendable

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Scientific American talks about how you can possibly train yourself to be more compassionate through meditation.

When engaged in compassionate meditation, the brain region known as the insula burst into action when the expert meditators heard the sound of a woman in distress. (The insula—a part of the limbic system—has been associated with the visceral feeling of emotion, a key part of empathizing with another’s emotional state.)

And when these experts heard the female screams or the sound of a baby laughing, their brains showed more activity than the novices in areas like the right temporal-parietal juncture, which plays a role in understanding another’s emotion.

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