Warming for body and soul for the people on the street

For a long time, compassion was considered something that only religions or spiritual traditions were responsible for. One of the first to approach the subject of compassion from a neuroscientific perspective was Paul Gilbert, Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Derby. He studied what effects simply practicing a compassion meditation can have on the brain and on human behavior. Subjects in one group meditated on compassion for thirty minutes a day for two weeks. Those in the other group learned to think more discriminately about difficult situations in their lives. At the end of the experiment, the participants were asked whether they wanted to keep their fee, which they would receive for this study, or donate it to charity. The subjects who had meditated were significantly more likely to want to donate it than those who had solely reflected on the subject.