IMAGINE IF WE COULD TAP INTO THE PART OF THE BRAIN THAT MAKES US ALTRUISTIC AND COMPASSIONATE
About Us
Project Compassion (The Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education) is striving to create a community of scholars and researchers, including neuroscientists, psychologists, neuroeconomists and contemplative scholars. Drawing from such varied disciplines - from etiological approaches that look at evolutionary roots to the neuroscientific study of the brain mechanisms, and from philosophical and contemplative perspectives to cognitive and social psychology as well as neuroeconomics - Project Compassion is working to gain a deep understanding of compassion and its associated human behaviors in all its richness.
An important aspect of Project Compassion will be to critically engage with Buddhist and other contemplative traditions that contain a rich mental taxonomy and, more importantly, clearly delineated mental cultivation techniques aimed at developing and enhancing specific qualities of the human mind and heart.
This initiative envisioned at Project Compassion will:
- Use rigorous scientific methods to define the neural basis for compassion and altruistic behavior.
- Serve as a major hub for a scientific study of compassion and altruistic behavior both nationally and internationally.
- Create tools to allow individuals to potentiate feelings of compassion and altruism.
- Encourage and support collaborative research on compassion among a variety of disciplines.
- Disseminate research findings on an international scale using a number of media forums.
