Ep.79 – Can We Be Trained To Be More Compassionate? Conversation with Dr. Olga Klimecki

TRANSCRIPT

Gissele: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Love and Compassion Podcast with Gissele. We believe that love and compassion have the power to heal our lives and our world. Don’t forget to like and subscribe for more amazing content today. We’re wondering can we be trained to be more compassionate?

And our guest today is Dr. Olga Klimecki who is a neuroscientist and a psychologist who earned her doctorate degree in the University of Zurich Olga’s, a psychologist and neuroscientist who’s interested in understanding the neural mechanisms that shape our social emotions in adaptive ways. Her doctoral research investigated neural behavior and emotional plasticity induced by training social emotions like compassion and empathy.

The results of these longitudinal studies in adults provided evidence for the plasticity of social emotions spanning the levels of neural function, emotional resilience, and helping behavior are her current interests include meditation and [00:01:00] promoting conflict resolution through compassion. Please join me in welcoming the amazing Dr.

Olga Klimecki. Hi Olga.

Dr. Klimecki: Hi. Thank you for having me here. Thank you for the invitation.

Gissele: Oh, thank you for being on the show. I’ve been a big fan of your work for a very, very long time. I was so excited when you published with Tanya Singer, your work on the difference between, empathetic distress and compassion and all of the work that you’re doing on aging.

I mean, it’s just, it’s just phenomenal work. I was wondering if you could tell the listeners what actually got you started on your journey. Like, what drew you to study empathy and compassion?

Dr. Klimecki: Yeah. Thank you for the question. it’s a longer journey. It’s started in my student years. I had a friend who was meditating and I found that idea of going to a place and being silent for a week.

Very intriguing and I felt like trying it out myself. And so with my background [00:02:00] interest in psychology and in neuroscience, I finally found a PhD possibility where I could study not only. Psychological mechanisms and the brain, but also with a link to meditation, which I found very exciting. And even though in the beginning of my PhD I tried out different forms of socio-emotional training, including nonviolent communication and others, I was most drawn to the meditation indeed, which I started at the same time practicing meditation as I started investigating meditation.

So That’s

Gissele: beautiful

Dr. Klimecki: background story. Yeah.

Gissele: in terms of your research, how have you found that meditation has helped you

 has your meditation practice helped you understand some of the findings

Dr. Klimecki: Yeah, definitely. I think it’s really interwoven.

Like sometimes I get ideas through the practice.

Gissele: And also about the [00:03:00] limitations. And sometimes the research I read or I do also informs me about potential limitations. For instance, what I learned from the research, which something I cannot never learn from my own practice, is the diversity of responses in our different participants.

Dr. Klimecki: So in the papers, we always report mean results, whereas the diversity of how people experience it. It’s very large. So in all our studies, there are people who improve, who get worse, who don’t change much. And working with the participants, I really got to hear their different stories, their different angles.

And over time, I, because we all go through different stages in life, I also experienced some of these benefits. Sometimes I experienced some of the adverse effects of me