I was recently interviewed by The Browser – a fabulous site which compiles quality writing from around the web

George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London is your second choice. What does it teach us?

I think that Orwell was one of the great travel adventurers of the 20th century. The reason I think that is because in Down and Out in Paris and London he showed that empathy could become an extreme sport and the guideline for the art of living. It’s the second half of the book that I particularly like, in which he describes how he went tramping in east London. He would dress up as a tramp and go into the streets of London, fraternising with beggars and people living on the streets. He was trying to empathise with people who lived on the social margins.

One has to remember that Orwell had an incredibly privileged background. He went to Eton, he was an officer in the colonial police in Burma for five years. He realised that he didn’t know how everyday people lived, so his experiments in the late 1920s and 30s of tramping in London were a form of travel really, or experiential adventuring. He was trying to experience how other people lived, to get a taste of their lives. By doing so, he discovered that empathy isn’t something that makes you good but something that is good for you. So for me, Orwell is one of my great empathic heroes.

Tell us more about the crucial role of empathy, which I know is a great interest of yours. What should we all keep in mind about empathy?

I think we’ve been too obsessed with self-interest over the last century, and that’s limited the way that we pursue the good life. I think that empathy – the ability to try to imagine yourself into someone else’s life, to look through their eyes – can expand our lives enormously. Of course, if you see somebody begging under a bridge you might feel sorry for them or toss them a coin, but that’s not empathy, it’s sympathy or pity. Empathy is when you have a conversation with them, try to understand how they feel about life, what it’s like sleeping outside on a cold winter’s night – try to make a real human connection and see their individuality.

The benefit of this is not only that it widens your own moral universe, but that it engages you with other people and other ways of living. It expands your curiosity to new ideas of how to live. That’s what happened to Orwell. He expanded his moral universe by talking to beggars and people sleeping on the streets, but also he met incredible characters. He was energised for his literary work by everything that he saw. It was the great travel adventure of his life, and that’s ultimately what I think empathy can do for us.

The lessons which Orwell says he learned from this experience of poverty seem almost mundane – simply that he shall “never again think that all tramps are drunken scoundrels, nor expect a beggar to be grateful when I give him a penny”.

I think it’s anything but mundane. The traditional way to think about social change is about changing political institutions – new laws, new policies, overthrowing governments and so on. I think social change is actually about creating a revolution of human relationships. About changing the way people treat each other on an everyday basis. That’s what Orwell was learning about. He was talking to individuals – understanding the minutiae of their lives – and after his time living in the streets of London he went on to do journalistic work which was really about trying to connect with human lives.

For example, in his book The Road to Wigan Pier there’s a famous essay called “Down the Mine”, when he goes down a coal mine and tries to understand what it’s like to be a coal miner. These coal miners were powering British society at the time – coal created everything. Orwell said if you don’t understand their lives, you understand nothing.

Read the full interview here - and discover my other top books on the art of living.

The following article originally appeared in The Guardian.

The great tragedy of modern parenting is that we’ve forgotten its history – and mothers are paying the price. Contrary to popular belief, the superdad who takes on a serious share of childcare and housework is not a new invention. Before the industrial revolution – a mere couple of hundred years ago – most men were stay-at-home fathers, skilled at comforting wailing babes and bathing squirming toddlers. I didn’t know this four years ago when my partner, Kate, became pregnant with twins. I had never wanted to have children, worrying that it would scupper my hopes of becoming a writer, so I panicked. How was I going to embrace the seismic shock of double-dose fatherhood?

The easy option would have been to play the typical bloke and let Kate – who has her own career – do most of the work. In British families where both parents work full-time, women still spend one-third more hours than men on household duties. Once they get home from the office, most mothers face a “second shift” in the home. The resulting strains are regularly vented in discussion forums on the internet. This recent post on Mumsnet received scores of sympathetic responses: “It has just dawned on me that my husband has absolutely no idea how hard I work looking after three kids under four whilst running my own business. I want to punch the useless twat!”

In my pre-dad days, I never really considered the gender imbalances and simply assumed it was the natural way of things for mothers to take command in the home, as they were the ones with all the maternal equipment and instinct. It was an unthinking view, even though my own father had taken full charge of parenting duties after my mother’s death from breast cancer when I was 10. He was the one who cooked supper for me and my sister every evening and vacuumed the house on Saturday mornings.

Seeking reassurance for my imminent life of fatherhood, while sweating in anticipation of the birth, I began reading parenting manuals. Few were written with men in mind. So I followed my bookworm instincts and began exploring parenting in the past and in other cultures. There I discovered how wrong I had been.

My prejudices started to crack when I stumbled across the Aka Pymies. Living in the jungles of the western Congo basin, Aka men are the world’s most dedicated dads. For 47% of each day they are either holding their children or are within arm’s reach of them. It’s the Aka man who will calm his crying infant in the night, even offering a gentle suck on his nipple (no, I have not tried this myself).

According to the anthropologist (and father of seven) Barry Hewlett, who spent two decades studying the Aka, the high level of paternal involvement may be due to the nature of their traditional subsistence activity, the net hunt. Men and women take part in this seasonal venture to trap small animals, and the babies come too, with men having the main responsibility for carrying them over the long distances covered. The more childcare Aka men do, says Hewlett, the more attached they become to their kids. Once they start, they don’t want to stop.

Yes, I know the Aka are an extreme case, but they are not alone. When Europeans first arrived in Tahiti in the 18th century, they were shocked to find that women could become chiefs while men routinely cooked and looked after children. In around one in four traditional cultures studied by anthropologists, men have played a major parental role. That still leaves a clear majority of societies in which women bear most of the childcare burden – indeed, in a third of cultures men barely lift a finger to help. The point, though, is to recognise the wide variety of parenting set-ups across human societies.

With the Aka on my mind, my assumption that childrearing was an essentially female occupation was now looking embarrassingly flimsy. But I could still tell myself that their culture wasn’t mine. Turning to European history, however, only challenged me further. We have not always been so different from the Aka as we might imagine.

The first clue lies in language. In the late Middle Ages, a husband was a man whose work, like a housewife’s, took place in and around the home: “hus” is the old spelling of “house” and “band” concerns his bond to the house that he rented or owned. One of his main tasks was farm work – and that’s husbandry, a term still used today.

This is revealing of pre-industrial society because, in rural areas especially, family life and working life were based in the home. Running the household was a joint enterprise: while a wife rocked the baby, her husband built the cradle and cut hay for the child to lie on.

As men were around the house much more, it’s not surprising that they often took on a big child-rearing role. A traveller visiting an English village in 1795 recorded: “In the long winter evenings the husband cobbles shoes, mends the family clothes and attends the children while the wife spins.” No slumping in front of the telly for an evening of Top Gear back then. Likewise, in the United States in the 17th and 18th centuries, says the historian Mary Frances Berry, ”Fathers had primary responsibility for childcare beyond the early nursing period.”

Men were also thrust into single parenthood because so many mothers died in childbirth. Today one in 12 single-parent households in Britain is headed by men, but between 1600 and 1800, it was one in four. While men might remarry or employ domestic servants if they had the means, some one-third of single fathers during this period had no live-in support from other adults.

Let’s not pretend that pre-industrial man was a domestic goddess. Women were typically still at the heart of the home and frequently couldn’t drag their men out of the ale house. But the modern hands-on father clearly has his predecessors.

The intriguing question is how we ended up today with women bearing the brunt of the housework and childcare. The standard explanation is patriarchy: that during the industrial revolution, between 1750 and 1900, men exerted their power by taking most of the new factory jobs, leaving women indoors to boil soiled nappies.

But that is too quick and not quite the whole of it. The truth is also that men were deskilled by industrial technology. With the invention of the enclosed iron stove in the 18th century, for instance, men no longer had to spend as much time at home chopping firewood. Then when coal replaced wood as fuel, they had to go out and earn cash to buy it instead. Men’s other traditional household crafts such as making shoes, tools and furniture were taken over by machines – but there were no clever gadgets invented to nurse a sick child. So by the 20th century, women were left holding the baby while men walked through the factory gates. Men’s long-standing role in the household had become a distant memory.

Nobody is taught this history at school. But when I discovered it, one of the most powerful myths of our time exploded before my eyes. Despite decades of women’s liberation, it is still widely seen as “natural” for women to be in charge of the home, while men charge off to the office. History has forced me to admit that, while women might breastfeed, there is no special female gene for sterilising bottles or cleaning the bathroom.

This is what inspired me to join the proud – if forgotten – tradition of the househusband. When our girl-boy twins, Siri and Casimir, were born, I stopped work for three months to look after them full-time with Kate (easy enough in countries like Sweden with 12 months of paternity leave; harder in Britain where the law is less generous). Now we both work a four-day week and split the household chores and childcare. Neither of us relishes changing nappies or endlessly peeling raisins off the kitchen floor, but I have accepted the realities of shared parenting as an important part of my life and who I want to be. Making pizza with my kids for lunch each Wednesday is a ritual I cherish – despite the sticky fingers and clouds of flour – and I love taking them to frolic at their playgroup, even if there are only one or two other men in the room.

I’m surprised by how much becoming a father has remoulded my character. I’ve become far more emotionally sensitive – I feel sorrows more deeply but also joys more strongly, a change for which I am grateful. It is as if my emotional range has increased from a meagre octave to a full keyboard of human feelings. That’s a pretty good argument for getting stuck in as a dad.

It certainly helps that my office is at the top of the house. In fact, history is coming full circle thanks to broadband and flexible working, which are bringing many men’s working lives back into the home in a way that has not been seen for nearly three centuries. That gives a growing number of fathers like myself the opportunity – and the obligation – to get more involved in their children’s lives, whether it’s making packed lunches or taking them for their annual jabs. We’re getting more medieval every day, and that’s a good thing.

One of my most unexpected delights is that I have found new personal heroes: my favourite writers who also managed to be engaged dads. I can picture George Orwell rising at dawn to knock out an essay on his Remington typewriter, then wheeling his son Richard in a pram through the streets of postwar north London. Then there’s JG Ballard, who raised his three children after his wife died suddenly in 1964. After making breakfast and dropping them off at school, he would sit down at his desk at 9am to start writing, with his first whisky of the day as company. “Some fathers make good mothers, and I hope I was one of them,” he wrote.

If they could do it, I should at least try. Of course, I am still torn between my family duties and career aspirations. But I’m learning, slowly, to become the father I never wanted to be.

 This article originally appeared in The Guardian © 2012. It is based on my new book The Wonderbox: Curious Histories of How to Live.

When asking the big questions about life, love, work and death, we sometimes forget that people have been grappling with these issues for centuries – and that means we’re missing out. As Goethe put it, ‘he who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth’.

So how can characters from history help lead our lives in new directions in 2012? Here’s my personal selection of five icons from the past who offer good ideas for better living.

1.Matsuo Basho: make an alternative pilgrimage

The seventeenth-century Japanese poet Basho was a compulsive wanderer who reinvented the art of travel. On one of his pilgrimages, lasting over two years, he naturally visited the holiest Buddhist shrines. But his originality was also to make pilgrimages to non-religious sites that held deep personal meaning for him, such as seeking out the willow trees described by his favourite poets.

The lesson for today? Instead of dedicating your next vacation to getting a tan, make a personal pilgrimage, heading for somewhere that resonates with meaning in your life. Maybe the village where your grandmother was born – see the streets she played in as a child, talk to those who knew her. And if you want the full Basho experience, make sure you walk there in a pair of straw sandals.

2.Henry David Thoreau: experiment with simple living

The American naturalist Henry David Thoreau was incensed by the growing commercialism of his age, so in the 1840s he went off to live alone in the Massachusetts woods in a log cabin built with his own hands. As part of his adventure in self-sufficiency, Thoreau grew beans, potatoes, and corn, and spent his days reading, writing and observing the beauties of nature. ‘A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone,’ he concluded in Walden.

Thoreau believed that if you can live cheaply, then you won’t need to work so much, granting you the sublime gift of free time. So try this. For one month keep detailed accounts of all your expenses, classifying each purchase as a ‘need’ or a ‘want’, and in the following month attempt to halve what you spend on wants. You might feel surprisingly liberated because if you can save money, you can create time.

3.Helen Keller: create a sensory map

In 1900 Helen Keller became the first deaf-blind person ever to graduate from a university. Her writings display an extraordinary sensitivity to everything around her. ‘My world is built of touch-sensations,’ she wrote, ‘the velvet of the rose is not that of a ripe peach or of a baby’s dimpled cheek’. She could even recognise all her friends instantly by their smell. And she thought most sighted people failed to put their senses to full use – ‘when they look at things, they put their hands in their pockets.’

The message from her life is to rediscover our sensory selves, cultivating neglected senses such as touch, smell or hearing. Why not create a sensory map of your local neighbourhood and go exploring? Seek out the medieval scent of smoked fish in the market or, eyes shut, feel the contours of a sculpture in the park.

4.Claiborne Paul Ellis: challenge a belief

Born into a poor white family in North Carolina in 1924, C.P. Ellis became a leader of the Ku Klux Klan. In 1971 he attended a community meeting and was forced to work alongside black civil rights activist Ann Atwater. He was shocked to discover how much they had in common, from the oppression of poverty to family struggles. It exploded his prejudices about black people. He tore up his KKK membership card in front of a thousand onlookers. They were friends for the rest of their lives.

Challenging our beliefs and prejudices is one of the best ways to live on the edge. Have a conversation with a stranger once a week, especially the kind of person you think you don’t like. Try to see the world through their eyes, and imagine how you must look to them.

5.Mary Wollstonecraft: take to the streets

The eighteenth-century feminist firebrand and writer of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was an expert at breaking social conventions. She embarked on a career as an author when almost no women did so, went to Paris during the revolution, and had scandalous affairs and a child out of wedlock. Hers was a life of experiment, and one that should inspire us take risks and challenge the rules.

She also saw that the art of living calls on us to get politics into the bloodstream. So she would be sure to support the idea that at least once this coming year, we should all take to the streets in an act of political protest or civil disobedience, be it marching against hospital cuts or joining the struggle to combat climate change. Don’t watch from the sidelines: be a political player.

So let icons be icons – these figures from history are waiting to lead you into a 2012 with a difference.

This article first appeared in the Huffington Post and is based on my new book The Wonderbox: Curious Histories of How to Live.

Ready for a digital diet in 2012? In this article just published in the Independent on Sunday – and based on my new book The Wonderbox: Curious Histories of How to Live – I argue why we need less electro-chatter and more thoughtful, face-to-face conversation.

There is a crisis in the art of conversation, and it’s making us hungry. On the one hand, we face a famine of quality conversation in our relationships. The typical British couple spends more time watching television together – on average, 55 minutes a day – than talking to each other. And the most common reason given for divorce in the West is wives complaining that their husbands don’t speak or listen to them.

It’s about what the last three thousand years of human history can tell us about better living, and explores twelve universal topics, from work and love to money, creativity and empathy. What might we learn from the Ancient Greeks about the different varieties of love, from the industrial revolution about changing career, or from ancient Japanese pilgrims on the art of travel?

‘The Wonderbox is a cornucopia of delights. Completely fascinating, beautifully written and brimming with insights that challenge our entrenched and predictable ways of seeing and doing, it draws on an amazing range of stories from the history of human culture to explain how we can find true meaning in life. Every thinking home should have one!’ – Michael Wood, historian, broadcaster and author of The Story of England

Find out more about the book here. You can buy it from Amazon here.

The book is being launched with a series of five talks at The School of Life, Life Lessons from The Wonderbox, starting January 11 with ‘The Six Varieties of Love’.

Best wishes and happy reading!

Roman

But there’s much more to compassion than that. It’s time we recognised it as a source of radical social change which can erode prejudice, create human bonds across social divides, and spur political action. A flowering of compassion was at the roots of the anti-slavery movement in the eighteenth century, the creation of organisations to tackle child poverty in the nineteenth, and countless other political initiatives. ‘So often when people hear about suffering in our world they feel guilty,’ says Desmond Tutu, ‘but rarely does guilt actually motivate action like empathy or compassion.’

What are the origins of this more politically charged approach to compassion? I trace it back to the year 1206, when Giovanni Bernadone, the twenty-three-year-old son of a wealthy merchant, went on a pilgrimage to the Basilica of St Peter’s in Rome. He could not help noticing the contrast between the opulence and lavishness within the basilica – the brilliant mosaics, the spiral columns – and the poverty of the beggars sitting outside its doors. He persuaded one of them to exchange clothes with him and spent the rest of the day in rags begging for alms.

Not long after, when Giovanni was out riding near his home town, he met a leper. Lepers were the outcasts of medieval society, and were both shunned and despised. Many were deformed and crippled, with missing noses and bleeding sores. They were forbidden to enter towns and to drink from wells or springs. Nobody would touch them for fear of contracting their dreaded disease. But Giovanni forced himself to stifle his immediate feeling of revulsion for lepers, which he had harboured since childhood. He dismounted his horse, gave the leper a coin and kissed his hand. The leper kissed him in return.

These episodes were turning points in the young man’s life. He soon founded a religious order whose brothers worked for the poor and in the leper houses, and who gave up their worldly goods to live in poverty, like those whom they served. Giovanni Bernadone, known to us now as St Francis of Assisi, is remembered for declaring, ‘Give me the treasure of sublime poverty: permit the distinctive sign of our order to be that it does not possess anything of its own beneath the sun, for the glory of your name, and that it have no other patrimony than begging.’

St Francis’s life was an instance of radical compassion in action, one which has been an inspiration to social and political activists for over 800 years. If we want to take compassion seriously, we should think about how we might follow his example by stepping into the shoes of those whose lives might be very different from our own. Clothes swap anyone?

You can watch the famous moment when St Francis meets the leper in Roberto Rossellini’s superb film The Flowers of St Francis (1950) here.

I’ll be introducing religious historian Karen Armstrong’s sermon at The School of Life on November 20, where she’ll be talking about her book Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life.

Roman Krznaric: To what extent is What I Did a new direction for you as a novelist?

Christopher Wakling: Each of my novels has felt like a step away from the one before it, but with What I Did I took a leap.

That’s largely to do with the narrative voice. Billy is six, and he tells the story. It begins when he runs away from his father and into a busy road. Billy’s father catches him up and smacks him, hard. When a passer-by objects, Billy’s dad tells her to get lost.

She does the opposite. She informs social services, who launch an investigation into the family, an investigation with which Billy’s dad refuses to cooperate, and the implications of which Billy cannot understand. Between them they make matters infinitely worse…

So on one level the book is about the boundary between the state and the family and the issue of whether or not it’s ever justifiable to smack a child. But it’s also about parental love – how far will we go to protect and hang on to those we love?

And at its core, because of its narrative voice, the novel is about childhood, about being six: the extreme present-tenseness; the jump-cuts in focus; and the frequently hilarious misunderstandings children make.

Although the subject matter is dark, Billy’s voice leavens the novel, I hope.

Roman Krznaric: How did you go about discovering what it’s like to be inside the mind of a six-year-old boy? And what were the biggest surprises and challenges along the way?

Christopher Wakling: I had a cunning master-plan. It involved getting my wife pregnant, and lying in wait for about six years.

No, I can’t claim that. But I do have two small children, and I have been lucky enough to spend a great deal of time looking after them through and beyond their pre-school years.

By ‘lucky enough’ I mean completely in love, and ‘murderously bored’ for long stretches.

Until, that was, I made myself focus hard on what was in front of me. What were my children thinking? What did they get, and what didn’t they understand?

It’s a common misconception that children say exactly what they mean. They don’t: though they’re often pretty transparent, there’s a subtext to child-speak, too.

I started writing down the things they said. I filled notebooks with observations and transcriptions of conversations. Then I started stringing bits of notebook together.

This didn’t equate to a voice, as such; as with any narrative standpoint, creating Billy’s voice meant shaping and altering real life. Stealing, then lying. The stealing bit takes patience and a willingness to try and see the world through another pair of eyes. The lying bit is a lot of fun.

Roman Krznaric: Do you think a novel can work if the writer doesn’t make the reader empathise with the main characters?

Christopher Wakling: No. I don’t think the reader has to like the main characters (though book-groups up and down the land are testimony to the fact that it helps if they do), but in order to believe in a fictional protagonist readers certainly have to understand where that character is coming from. What does the character want? Where did they begin? Where are they trying to go? These questions establish motive and are useful for the plot. But the bigger question – how does the character see the world? – has the power, if answered convincingly by a novelist, to immerse the reader in a new consciousness. Do that well and readers will care about the world of the novel beyond the last page.

Roman Krznaric: In what ways did writing What I Did change the way you look at yourself, and at society?

Christopher Wakling: Writing – and researching – the novel made me more aware of the impossibly hard job undertaken by child protection workers.

They can’t win: they’re damned if they fail to intervene where a child is suffering abuse, and they’re damned if they step in where there is no need.

High profile ‘Baby P’ cases illustrate the former difficulty; there are fewer stories (partly a result of the secrecy cloaking the family courts) illustrating the latter.

I did, however, read a number of articles by Camilla Cavendish in the Times a few years ago, cataloguing families torn apart by accusations which later proved to be unfounded.

These made me think: what would I do faced with a situation in which somebody was trying to take my children away, saying it was for their own benefit. I hope I wouldn’t be as unreasonable as Jim (Billy’s father in the book) but I don’t know.

And writing about whether it is ever justifiable to smack a child made me reassess our society’s moral code, as well as my own. When I was growing up, smacking was the norm. Now it’s not. This change interested me. The book doesn’t preach on the subject, but it explores the ramifications of the shift.

Roman Krznaric: Your novel has been compared to Emma Donoghue’s Room, which is narrated by a five-year-old boy. How would you personally describe the literary tradition to which What I Did belongs?

Christopher Wakling: What I Did taps into a rich seam of books narrated by children. Novels such as The Catcher in the Rye, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, A Clockwork Orange, Vernon God Little, The Butcher Boy, and – most recently – Room, of course. (Ironically, Room is the only one I hadn’t read before I wrote the novel: it hadn’t come out yet.)

First person stories tend to be more immediate, skewed, and potentially disorientating than most; childhood is all of these things, times ten. These books are therefore an extreme form of first person narrative.

The gap between what the narrator thinks is going on and what the reader knows is actually the case is often wider with a child narrator. The younger the child, the wider it gets. The disjunct can be poignant, telling and hilarious by turns. It’s a challenge for a writer to control, but it’s also rewarding…

Roman Krznaric: I am constructing a library of the greatest Empathy Books of all time – books which allow us to step into the shoes of others and create a human connection. What five books would you like to put in my library?

Christopher Wakling: The child’s perspective should be represented in this library of yours, so I’ll go for any five of the books mentioned above. Take your pick. But make sure you include The Butcher Boy. And The Catcher in the Rye, and A Clockwork Orange. And two more. One of which should be mine…

What I find missing in Pinker’s worthy tome – and books which make a similar argument, such as Jeremy Rifkin’s The Empathic Civilization – is a clear steer on how we can expand our capacity to empathise in everyday life. How exactly can we get better at it? And how can we integrate it into the way we approach the art of living? An answer lies not in the musings of psychologists or all those neuroscientists who have become obsessed with finding the empathic hotspots in our brains, but in the ideas of one of the great empathic adventurers of the twentieth century, Mahatma Gandhi.

His philosophy of empathy is embodied in what is known as ‘Gandhi’s talisman’:

I will give you a talisman. Recall the face of the poorest and weakest man whom you may have seen, and ask yourself if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him. Will he gain anything by it? Will it restore him to a control over his own life and destiny? Will it lead to swaraj [freedom] for the hungry and spiritually starving millions? Then you will find your doubts and yourself melting away.

The talisman contains a moral framework that each of us can choose to live by: to consider the perspective of the most marginal members of society when making decisions on ethical issues, and to ensure they benefit in some way. Gandhi challenges us to imagine ourselves into the lives of people whose everyday existence might be vastly different from our own. Beyond this, the talisman is a guide to confronting our existential difficulties. When we feel paralysed by doubt or entangled in personal problems to the extent that we don’t know what to do, we can find liberation and direction through an act of empathic imagining. The talisman may provide clarity in our state of confusion or indecision.

Gandhi lived out his empathic ideals. He worked as a nurse in South Africa as a young man: during the Zulu rebellion in Natal, he nursed Zulus who had been flogged and left by the British, whose regular nurses refused to attend them. His experiments living on ashrams were also an exercise in stepping into other people’s shoes. ‘Our ambition was to live the life of the poorest people,’ he said. That’s why he tended goats and cleaned toilets, alongside leading the resistance against British rule in India.

But his real originality was to stress the importance of empathising with one’s enemies. During the growing conflict between Hindus and Muslims in the years leading up to independence in 1947, he declared, ‘I am a Muslim! And a Hindu, and a Christian and a Jew’.

The half million deaths that occurred during partition in violence between Hindus and Muslims showed that the moral challenge of empathising with one’s adversaries was too great in that turbulent moment in history. But I still think we can learn from Gandhi’s approach. Trying to look through the eyes of those whose views we don’t agree with – whether it is a nasty boss at work, an argumentative sibling, or a neighbour who does not share our religious creed – has the potential not only to challenge our own prejudices and forge social tolerance, but can create new and nurturing human bonds in our lives.

On 25 October I will be hosting The School of Life’s Curry With Gandhi. Come and join me for an evening of Gandhi-inspired conversation.

Why do we shudder when we watch a tarantula crawling across James Bond’s chest in a 007 movie? And what can looking into a monkey’s brain tell us about our capacity to share in the emotional experiences of other people? Answers to these questions appear in The Empathic Brain: How the Discovery of Mirror Neurons Changes our Understanding of Human Nature, the fascinating and entertaining new book by Christian Keysers, Professor for the Social Brain at the University Groningen in the Netherlands. Keysers, one of the world’s most distinguished and innovative neuroscientists, was part of the famous team at the University of Parma, Italy, that discovered auditory mirror neurons in the macaque monkey, which has revolutionised thinking about how empathy works in human beings. In this exclusive interview for Outrospection, I talk to him about his book, and how far neuroscience has really taken us in our understanding of empathy.

Roman Krznaric: What exactly have you discovered about the ‘empathic brain’, and the importance of mirror neurons?

Christian Keysers: The question that fascinates me is how we understand others. I often just look my wife in the face, and instantly know how she feels (and thus, whether I’m in trouble or not…). Hollywood movies are a good example: your heart beats faster as you watch a tarantula crawl on James Bond’s chest in the movie Dr No, your hands sweat and your skin tingles under the spider’s legs. Effortlessly, you feel what Bond feels.

We all know this, and take it for granted. What makes this capacity so mysterious for me as a scientist, is that Bond’s feelings are triggered by neural activity in his brain. I cannot see his brain, so how can I see so clearly what he feels?

Our work together with that of a handful of colleagues, has started to give us answers. Our brain automatically activates regions normally involved in our own actions, sensations and emotions, when we see what happens to other people. Mirror neurons in an individual’s brain fire both when the individual grasps a peanut and when she sees another do the same. This is what we have found in our discovery of mirror neurons in monkeys and using neuroimaging in humans: our brain mirrors the state of other people. Understanding what they feel then becomes understanding what you now feel in their stead. Neuroscience has discovered empathy.

What my book is about, is letting the reader share the thrill of these discoveries and understand how this colours our perception of others: When can we trust our empathy, when can we not? Why do some people have troubles understanding others?

Roman Krznaric: Psychologists often make a distinction between ‘affective empathy’, which is about mirroring or sharing emotions, and ‘cognitive empathy’, which is about perspective-taking and looking at the world through someone else’s eyes. It strikes me that much of the neuroscience research on empathy is focusing on the former while neglecting the latter. Do you agree with that? And what, if anything, has neuroscience discovered about our cognitive ability to step into someone else’s shoes and understand not just their emotions, but their values, experiences and other aspects of their worldview?

Christian Keysers: I think that the most exciting progress in my field is the discovery that the brain does not just mirror the emotions of others. We share the actions, sensations and emotions of the people around us. So if you see me grasp a cool glass of water, you share my intention to grasp the glass, what it feels like to grasp the glass, the cool sensation in my fingers and my satisfaction as I feel my thirst being quenched. This is richer than what the term ‘affective empathy’ suggests, and incorporates goals and sensations that traditional psychology had thought to be the result of much more cognitive processes.

If you try to think what movie would please a girl you want to seduce, mirror systems however incline you to bring her to a good action movie (because that would make you happy in her stead). But think again: women don’t always like action movies. What you should do is think about what women might like instead, and distrust your empathy. This is what I would call mentalizing, and what some psychologists call ‘cognitive empathy’. Some very good people have worked on understanding how the brain mentalizes. They have found certain brain regions that are consistently active while mentalizing (medial prefrontal cortex and temporo-parietal junction). What we still lack, and there I agree with you, is an understanding of what happens in these mentalizing regions.

The reason I focus on mirroring, is because seeing activity in somatosensory regions while viewing others being touched is primarily information about ‘where’ the process occurs. But it also shows that you transform what others feel into representations of what you would feel in their stead; ‘where’ becomes ‘how’ you understand others. When you study mentalizing, and find regions that are not involved in your own experiences, it is hard to know what actually happens within these regions. ‘Where’ remains where.

Roman Krznaric: When early astronomers in the seventeenth century started looking at the sky with their new telescopes, they were able to see so many more stars and moons and planets than were visible with the naked eye, but they did not yet have a great understanding of how the solar system, or the universe more broadly, really functioned. It would be decades, or even longer, before that understanding significantly developed. They were much better at description than explanation. It seems to me that the nueroscience of empathy may be at a similar stage of development: MRI scanners can detect and describe an enormous amount that is going on in our brains, but our understanding of how neurons really shape our everyday emotions and behaviour is at quite a rudimentary level. Do you think this is a fair analogy? Or is the neuroscience of empathy more advanced than I suspect?

Christian Keysers: If you don’t mind, let me start with suggesting you are wrong. Hundreds of studies now show hundreds of blobs in the brain while people look at the actions, sensations and emotions of others. This is similar to seeing many planets and stars. But it all falls into place in a unifying theory of social cognition I describe in the book: we mirror the actions, sensations and emotions of others. This simple sentence predicts and describes most of these blobs. Unlike early astronomers, we thus do have a theory that condenses out of all these observations.

But I also agree with you to some extent: we still have much exciting work to do. In the book, I describe how neurons capable of mirroring could emerge simply by watching our own actions. I discuss evidence for how our perception is changed if we interfere with mirror activity. However, we still need to do a lot of detailed neurophysiology to derive a comprehensive wiring diagram of how a brain becomes empathic. Because this is so difficult in humans, we need animal models of empathy. Last week we just published a paper that shows that rats are also sensitive to what happens to other rats. This is an important step in that direction.

Roman Krznaric: What are the ethical implications of our new understanding of the empathic brain? Are there any clear messages about how we should go about treating other people?

Christian Keysers: Neuroscience is descriptive, not normative in a moral context. Just because we show that the brain can be empathic does not tell us that empathy is good or bad. It does not even tell us that we should be empathic. Where neuroscience is interesting, is by showing us the limits of our natural empathy, and helping us devise ethics that are compatible with how our brain works. For instance, our work shows that we feel what goes on in others by projecting what we would feel in their stead. In this context, ethics that suggest ‘treat others as they would like to be treated’ are harder to follow than ethics that suggest ‘treat others as you would like to be treated’.

Roman Krznaric: Do you think that the recent empathy research is really telling us a new story about human nature? Are we ‘homo empathicus’ as much as we are self-interested, individualistic creatures?

Christian Keysers: Let me be bold and say yes – it does tell us a new story. As westerners in particular, we were brought up to centre our thinking on individuals – individual rights, individual achievements. Journalism is a great example of that. Each time I write a press release with many names of collaborators that made a discovery possible, the article still reads as if I had done the work alone. The media likes showing single individuals that change our understanding of the world. It’s all about the individual.

But if you call the state of your brain your identity (and I would), what our research shows, is that much of it is actually what happens in the mind of other people. My personality is the result of my social environment. Even ‘my’ ideas are the result of all the ideas and skills of my forefathers, internalized in my brain through mirror-like phenomena. Also, whenever I take a decision to do something, mirror systems will let me share the pain and joy I make others feel. The fate of others colours my own feelings and thus my decisions. I is actually we. Neuroscience has put ‘we’ back into the brain. That is not a guarantee (and my wife will agree) that some of my actions are not egoistic and selfish, but it shows that egoism and selfishness are not the only forces that direct our brain. We are social animals to a degree most didn’t suspect only a decade ago.

Buy a copy of Christian Keyser’s The Empathic Brain here.

It recounts the story of the expeditionary force sent by the Persian monarch Xerxes, and how the invaders were thoroughly routed by their Greek rivals. When a messenger brings news of the defeat of their army and navy at Salamis, the Persian council of elders cry out: ‘O grief and grief again! Weep every heart that hears / This cruel, unlooked-for pain.’ Instead of glorifying the Athenians, Aeschylus describes the wives of lost Persian soldiers, who ‘each with tender tears in vain, weeps out her lonely life’. The audience is encouraged to feel the personal sorrows of their military rivals and to see the battle from the perspective of the vanquished barbarians.

Although some Athenians watching the unfolding drama may have been gloating over their victory, Aeschylus was asking them to undertake the radical act of empathising with the defeated enemy just at their moment of triumph. Even more striking is the fact that Aeschylus had himself fought the Persians at the earlier Battle of Marathon, where his own brother had been killed. Perhaps when writing the play he was remembering that while 191 Athenians fell in the conflict, 6,400 Persians lost their lives. The imagined cries of Persian mothers and widows may have been haunting him ever since.

The point of seeing a play like The Persians today is to help expand our empathic imaginations – to encourage us to look at the world through other eyes. But if Greek tragedy isn’t to your tastes, you might consider watching a film which similarly attempts to depict war from the perspective of enemies, or which otherwise has a strong empathy angle. Where should you begin? Here’s my top five:

1.All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) – the First World War from the perspective of a German footsoldier, and one the great pacifist movies of all time.

2.The Battle of Algiers (1966) – an extraordinary film about the Algerian War of Independence (1952-64) against French colonial occupation, viewed from both sides in the conflict.

3.Schindler’s List (1993) – Nazi businessman develops unexpected empathy with Jews via friendship with his accountant.

4.Letters from Iwo Jima (2006) – the first of Clint Eastwood’s pair of films about the Battle for Iwo Jima in the Second World War, this one through the eyes of Japanese soldiers.

5.Flags of Our Fathers (2006) – the second film in Eastwood’s pair, this time from the perspective of their US enemies.

I will be leading a workshop on empathy called ‘A Good Day To Think Beyond Yourself’ at The School of Life on Thursday June 23, as part of ‘A Good Week’, a global celebration of everything good