F.W.: Yeah. I think the general feeling is that Buddhism is more in tune with that line of thinking. Actually I will soon have a debate with the Dalai Lama. In the book I describe my first discussion with the Dalai Lama about those kinds of issues. The Dalai Lama has just recently published a book about ethics without religion and so I think Buddhism is more in tune with this because they also feel that there is continuity between a species, of course. So in Eastern religions the soul can travel between you to a cat and from a cat to a frog and from a frog to a human and so that's a very different way of looking at nature than the Western view which is a very hierarchical view where humans are on top of everything.
R.K.: Yes. Hierarchical is certainly a top-down way of seeing things. So another thing I am very interested in is how connection is tied together with this. Can you talk about your research in terms of how primates and humans connect to each other and the dimensions of connection?
F.W.: What do you mean? Literally, how we humans connect with animals?
R.K.: Not necessarily humans with animals, I mean animals with animals, or people with people, but it seems to me in the research you're doing in terms of looking at mirror neurons and caring and empathy, they all tie to the ways and the dimensions of connection between individuals within a species.
F.W.:Yeah. Mirror neurons are a very important part of the story in the sense that they blur the line between your own body and somebody else's body. Actually you know, the mirror neuron discovery is very interesting because they were discovered not in humans. Many people now think that they're so important to humans, but they were discovered in macaques in a laboratory in Italy. The first discovery actually had to do with the human-animal connections because what they did, they did experiments where a human reaches with his hand for an object and the monkey sees that and the monkey mirror neurons respond to that in exactly the same way as when the monkey itself reaches for the same object. So for the mirror neurons, and that's why they're called mirror neurons, the monkey's own movement is equivalent to somebody else, a human, reaching for the same object, and so for the monkey the monkey mirror neurons doesn't make a distinction between their own movement and somebody else's movement and that's actually done in a situation where the monkey identifies itself with a human. And so the thinking is that mirror neurons can be used within the species, but they can also be used outside the species if the movements are similar enough, or the motorics are similar enough.
R.K.: And you've written about how dogs have empathy and when a person is crying, or demonstrating pain, or suffering.
F.W.: Yeah. There are of course an enormous amount of stories on this. There's even now some experimental evidence. So, of course many people know that dogs respond to your emotions, but recently a team in the U.K. has done research where they ask a person in the family to cry, or to say that they're in pain, to act like that and then they see how the dog in the house responds. And the dogs actually do approach them, put their head in their lap, lick their faces, and things like that, and so the dog shows empathic responses. It's... by the way, it's the same experiment that people have done with children, with young children, and they show very similar responses.
R.K.: What I have been looking at in doing my radio show, looking at this bottom-up transition, is to try to get a big picture idea of how our core roots apply to this. Now, I believe we are transitioning from a top-down world that was created when we became attached to land and farming, when civilization evolved and that we're kind of transitioning back a bit towards a more bottom-up way because of the internet, because it has changed the way people think and interact with each other. Do you have any thoughts about that?
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