A famous person once said: "Empathy is oxygen for the soul." So if one is feeling shortness of breath, maybe one needs expanded empathy! This course will connect the dots between empathy and neuroscience ("brain science"). For example, empathic responsiveness releases the compassion hormone oxytocin, which blocks the stress hormone cortisol. Reduced stress correlates to reduced risk of such life style disorders as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, weak immune system, depression, and the common cold. We will engage each of the following modules in the discussion segment, including suggested readings. Except for the first two topics, we can take them in any order and the participants will get to select: 1. This is your mind on neuroscience - mirror neurons: do they exist, and if not, so what? 2. Sperry on the split brain: the information is in the system: how to get at it 3. The neuroscience of trauma - and how empathy gives us access to it 4. MRI research: as when Galileo looked through the telescope, a whole new world opens up. Note: the image depicted is the punch line to a joke attributed to Richard Feynman - "It's turtles all the way down" - whereas in neuroscience "It is neurons all the way down!" Granted if one has to explain the joke, it is not funny; but the video contains enough background to bring forth a laugh (one way or the other!). Expand your empathy and that of the community and check it out! Presenter: Lou Agosta, PhD, is the author of three scholarly, academic books on empathy, including A Rumor of Empathy: Resistance, Narrative, Recovery (Routledge 2015). He has taught empathy in history and systems of psychology at the Illinois School of Professional Psychology at Argosy University and offered a course in the Secret Underground Story of Empathy at the University of Chicago Graham School of Continuing Education. He is an empathy consultant in private practice in “on the forward edge in the Edgewater Community” in Chicago.

• published: 18 Dec 2016
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