BORN TO BE GOOD

Heard an interesting interview on NPR the other day with the author of Born To Be Good, where he talked about goodness and compassion and how we can basically retrain ourselves to be kinder and more compassionate. He said that in his research he did not find there to be any significant differences in the brain between men and women, however, women had an average of seven times the levels of oxytocin, a hormone which he says makes women more compassionate. As all mothers will tell you, we have even higher levels of oxytocin when we are breastfeeding a newborn. Made me put two and two together. So that's why new mothers can't stomach watching the news and violent films... because their oxytocin levels make them even more compassionate. Now that makes sense to me!

Summary from Amazon.com "A new examination of the surprising origins of human goodness. In Born to Be Good, Dacher Keltner demonstrates that humans are not hardwired to lead lives that are "nasty, brutish, and short"—we are in fact born to be good. He investigates an old mystery of human evolution: why have we evolved positive emotions like gratitude, amusement, awe, and compassion that promote ethical action and are the fabric of cooperative societies?

By combining stories of scientific discovery, personal narrative, and Eastern philosophy, Keltner illustrates his discussions with more than fifty photographs of human emotions. Born to Be Good is a profound study of how emotion is the key to living the good life and how the path to happiness goes through human emotions that connect people to one another."