And so I think the capability of women to put themselves -- I think we're better about putting ourselves into the other guy's shoes and having more empathy.
By measuring the students' smiles, researchers were able to predict how fulfilling and long-lasting a subject's marriage would be, (Laughter) how well she would score on standardized tests of well-being, and how inspiring she would be to others.
And just as you use the remote control device to alter the internal settings of your television to suit your mood, you use your language to alter the settings inside someone else's brain to suit your interests.
The explanation of that paradox is that, within our societies, we're looking at relative income or social position, social status -- where we are in relation to each other and the size of the gaps between us.
And luckily, there's a website for that, called Mechanical Turk, which is a website where you can post tasks that you don't want to do yourself, such as "Please summarize this text for me in six words."
So for example, many people share with me this wish, that some day a more advanced version of Siri, the digital assistant on Apple's iPhone, will be more like a best friend, someone who will listen when others won't.
I'm not suggesting that we turn away from our devices, just that we develop a more self-aware relationship with them, with each other and with ourselves.
Technology is making a bid to redefine human connection -- how we care for each other, how we care for ourselves -- but it's also giving us the opportunity to affirm our values and our direction.
And so what these studies are showing is that when you feed people misinformation about some experience that they may have had, you can distort or contaminate or change their memory.
It's the stigma inside of others, it's the shame, it's the embarrassment, it's the disapproving look on a friend's face, it's the whispers in the hallway that you're weak, it's the comments that you're crazy.
Now we can remember those four things for about 10 to 20 seconds unless we do something with it, unless we process it, unless we apply it to something, unless we talk to somebody about it.
Not at all -- in fact, I think that we all, in our day-to-day, minute-by-minute lives, struggle with these competing motivations of when or if to put our own interests above the interests of other people.
We need to stop ranking our hard against everyone else's hard to make us feel better or worse about our closets and just commiserate on the fact that we all have hard.
My family, my friends, complete strangers -- I had spent my entire life trying to not disappoint these people, and now I was turning the world upside down on purpose.
Being bullied as a kid created a sense of empathy in me toward the suffering of others, and it comes very unnaturally to me to treat people who are kind in any other way than how I would want to be treated.
And one of the exceptions, the interesting exception, is when you can show to people that there might be some self-interest in them making that leap of faith and changing a little bit.
But equally essential to what it means to be a free and fulfilled human being is to have a place that we can go and be free of the judgmental eyes of other people.
["Go rob other people"] (Laughter) Linguists call this borrowing, but we never give the words back, so I'm just going to be honest and call it stealing.
I think of my work as sort of a remix, in a way, because I'm working with somebody else's material in the same way that a D.J. might be working with somebody else's music.
That company came out right during the height of the recession when people really needed extra money, and that maybe helped people overcome their objection to renting out their own home to a stranger.
We don't trash the environment or court devastating accidents or expose others to the possibility of cancer, because we decided those things were expensive, destructive, not in our best interest.
So, another way to be pro-voice is to share stories, and one risk that you take on, when you share your story with someone else, is that given the same set of circumstances as you they might actually make a different decision.
There was so much pain and loneliness, there's so much incredible things when you look in somebody else's eyes, because in the gaze with that total stranger, that you never even say one word -- everything happened.
As those who enjoy reading will know, books have an extraordinary power to take you out of yourself and into someone else's mindset, so that, for a while at least, you look at the world through different eyes.
Researchers have found that people often feel more comfortable being honest and open about their inner selves with strangers than they do with their friends and their families -- that they often feel more understood by strangers.
The important thing about these studies is just how significant these interactions can be; how this special form of closeness gives us something we need as much as we need our friends and our families.
People from Denmark tell me that many Danes are so averse to talking to strangers, that they would rather miss their stop on the bus than say "excuse me" to someone that they need to get around.
But if that's true, why do some people, like the stranger who rescued me, do selfless things, like helping other people at enormous risk and cost to themselves?
Truly extraordinary altruists' compassion extends way beyond that circle, even beyond their wider circle of acquaintances to people who are outside their social circle altogether, total strangers, just like the man who rescued me.
And I've had the opportunity now to ask a lot of altruistic kidney donors how it is that they manage to generate such a wide circle of compassion that they were willing to give a complete stranger their kidney.
Is it possible that a hundred years from now people will think that donating a kidney to a stranger is just as normal and ordinary as we think donating blood and bone marrow is today?
Friends, acquaintances and strangers, men and women throughout my career ask me over and over, "Caroline, all that fire, all that danger, aren't you scared?"
But how do you reconcile this idea of it being bad to think of someone as a "loser, " with the idea that a lot of people like, of seizing control of your life, and that a society that encourages that, perhaps has to have some winners and losers?
And that capacity to empathize is the window through which you reach out to people, you do something that makes a difference in somebody's life -- even words, even time.
But what Rizzolatti found was a subset of these neurons, maybe about 20 percent of them, will also fire when I'm looking at somebody else performing the same action.
Yeah, I -- as you would expect -- get pretty frustrated by choices like what nail polish to put on because I have to rely on what other people suggest.
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Yeah, weirdo. Cabin boys should learn to mind their own business. 