A Rumor of Empathy

This show will be about how the past 12 shows have expanded empathy in the community, review the past 12 shows, saying how each has contributed to a conversation about empathy. This is like a summary or an index to the entire body of work on empathy. So in case you are wondering which conversation is most relevant to you, this is a good place to start. Hear about David Howe’s book What is Empathy and Why It Matters. Learn from James Garbarino about Listening To Killers: Lessons Learned from My 20 Years as a Psychological Expert Witness in Murder Case. Key term: “Listening”. Hear about how empathy is tracking software innovation as Affectiva in their implementation of Ekman’s Facial Action Coding Scheme. Get your mind blow – like really – in the work of Alice Dreger on what happens to social justice when empathy collides with the agenda of political advocacy groups and her book Galileo’s Middle Finger. Empathy is like oxygen for the soul - get some here and breath easier all week.

This show engages 5 more recommendations to expand your empathy. We started this conversation two weeks ago with several recommendations. This show continues the work. It will include further lessons learned from my three books on empathy. The occasion for the show is the publication of my book a rumor of empathy. My friends are excited about the publications – but what they have said to me is “Great Lou – nice work – but what I really need is tips and techniques is to expand my empathy in the next fifty minutes – and its already Wednesday at noon. I have been listening and that’s what this show is about. In empathy one person is quite simply in the presence of another human being. Empathy is supposedly like apple pie and motherhood. What’s not to like? Yet being empathic can be confronting and anxiety inspiring because one has to dispense with evaluations, filters, diagnostic labels, and egocentrism. Make empathy less of a rumor and an expanded reality in your world!

Join Lou and his special guest Stan Schatt, Futurist and writer, for a discussion of his latest novel Alien Love. You know, boy meets girl, girls turn out to be an Alien and then the CIA gets involved. This has rich comic and dramatic possibilities, but also points to significant issues of communication. And Stan is the communicator's communicator. Find out how he does it. Learn about Stan's paranormal mystery Silent Partner, a book about sexual identity. Pen-L Publishing will release its sequel, A Bullet for the Ghost Whisperer, in November 2015. Booktrope published Alien Love, a science fiction novel that Schatt likens to a cross between Casablanca and Star Wars in April 2015. Schatt also has published Extraterrestrial First Contact, a non-fiction study of the impact of first contact between humanity and alien races. Tune in for something completely different - and completely entertaining!

Lou is the author of three books on empathy - but what REALLY interests people are tips and techniques for expanding their empathy in their relationships and life. Along with celebrating the publication of Lou's latest book, A Rumor of Empathy, we will delve into practical methods of expanding your empathy. In empathy one person is quite simply in the presence of another human being. Empathy is supposedly like apple pie and motherhood. What’s not to like? Yet being empathic can be confronting and anxiety inspiring because one has to dispense with evaluations, filters, diagnostic labels, and egocentrism and be with the other person as a way of being. Empathy arouses subtle and pervasive resistances. A Rumor of Empathy engages such resistances to overcome them. People are naturally empathic and given half a chance empathy naturally unfolds and expands. Join Lou for an engaging conversation and plan on calling in with your questions and issues about how to expand your empathy.

Join Lou Agosta and his special guests Drs. Jesse Viner and Dale Monroe-Cook for an engaging conversation about the emotional, psychological, and human challenges of emerging adulthood. Drs. Viner and Monroe-Cook address these issues with their clients as Medical director and VP for Clinical Operations at YellowBrick, a national treatment center specializing in working with troubled emerging adults. What is emerging adulthood? What kind of breakdowns do the generations between 18 and 29 years old encounter in engaging in relationships, careers, finance, and life? How does the YellowBrick provide a foundation for turning break-downs in self-defeating behavior, emotional upset, addiction, learning disabilities, acting out, into break-throughs in accomplishment, personal satisfaction, and rewarding results? Drs Monroe-Cook and Viner has years of experience partnering with young adults, and their families, in breakdown and breakthrough. Join me and benefit from their guidance.

Join me and my special guest musician, teacher, and composer Mischa Zupko for a conversation about music, the emotions, empathy, and community on Wednesday June 3rd at noon Chicago time on VoiceAmerica Empowerment Radio. Mischa is an accomplished music teacher and composer. Music stimulates us to intense emotions, both high and low. Music sets the mood in movies. It stimulates buying behavior in ads. It relieves depression. It gets people dancing. Music can stimulate people with Parkinson’s disease who cannot otherwise move. Stroke patients can sing words that they cannot otherwise say. Music is a powerful force for bringing people together into community. Music takes up more space in the brain than language does – being human means being musical. Join me for an amazing conversation with musician, teacher, and composer Mischa Zupko.

Join Lou for a conversation with Joe Palombo, Founding Dean of the Institute for Clinical Social Work and Director of the Center for Neuroscience and Psychoanalytic Social Work. Joe’s work connects the dots between neuroscience and dynamic psychotherapy, talk therapy. Joe will share experiences from his seven years of study with the late Heinz Kohut, the innovator responsible for putting empathy on map, making empathy a household word prior to the discovery of mirror neurons. Joe will update us on the scientific grand challenge of integrating Kohut’s self psychology with brain science in the battle against learning disorders, to which his work is dedicated. The relationship between learning disorders and the development of the self is complex, and Joe discusses treatment issues, including how and when to recommend psychotherapy, how to think about the treatment process, and guidance for the parents of a child with a learning disorder. Join Lou and Joe for an engaging conversations

Join Lou for a conversation with Jonathan Brent, Executive Director of Yivo about how things were done in Odessa. This refers to a celebrated story by Isaac Babel. In 1925, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research was founded in Vilna (Wilno, Poland; now Vilnius, Lithuania), by key European intellectuals, including Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, to record the history and pioneer in the critical study of the language, literature and culture of the Jews of Eastern Europe. From its inception, YIVO was deeply concerned that the language and culture of East European Jewry were undergoing radical change in a rapidly modernizing world. YIVO's founders were tireless in collecting the documents and archival records of Jewish communities across Eastern Europe, years before anyone could have predicted the devastation that would befall them. Join Lou and Jonathan for an amazing conversation about the work being done at Yivo and about Jon's pending biography of Soviet-Jewish writer Isaac Babel.

Join Lou for a discussion with Michael Boylan, philosopher and thought leader, on justifying human rights and the uses of fiction in doing so. Michael is innovating in the uses of story telling, narrative, and fiction to open up depths of human experience that sometimes are missed by philosophical argumentation and categorization. This method puts us in touch with aspects of being a human being that are hidden in plain view. The conversation takes off from Michael’s 2014 book Natural Human Rights (Cambridge Press), which includes four original short stories that engage with human rights. Michael’s novel Rainbow Curve (2015) is also in the mix and rich in distinctions about sports, race, and politics in America. Join us for an engaging and stimulating conversation!

Three women a day die because of domestic violence (nnedv.org). What is gender violence? How many women and children suffer abuse? How to tell if you are in an abusive relationship? Why was Apna Ghar [Our Home] created? Join Lou Agosta and Radhika Sharma to answer these questions. We will also discuss how we as a society can support survivors of violence and prevent gender violence. Awareness of domestic violence – also called “intimate partner abuse” – has reached a level of Awareness where USA Today has a regular section on the latest perpetrations. Many who have been doing the difficult work for years are starting to be heard: Apna Ghar (Our Home) Inc., a 25-year old non-profit addressing the needs of immigrant and refugee women and their children who have suffered gender-based violence. Apna Ghar provides services to hundreds of immigrant and refugee women and children from Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Bosnia. Find out how you can make a difference.

Join me for a conversation with Alice Dreger, PhD., who starts out as a graduate student exploring the condition known as “hermaphroditism,” people born with sex organs that are ambiguous as to male or female, now called “intersex.” In reading the text books studied by her medical student husband, she discovers the interventions performed to “normalize” people sexually into the two canonical categories of male or female. Dreger discovers that many of the people whose genitals were surgically transformed were subsequently lied to about their natal [birth] sex by well-intentioned doctors and well-intentioned parents following the well-intentioned doctor’s guidance. Dreger gets into action working with the survivors to discover and recover the truth about their sexuality and even more importantly their humanity. Find out what happens next when Dreger's research surfaces scientific evidence that does not align perfectly with the social justice agenda.

Join me for a conversation with James Garbarino, the author of Listening to Killers (UCalifornia 2015) as he discusses lessons learned in his twenty plus years as a psychological expert witness in murder cases. Having empathy for the victims of violent crimes and the survivors is relatively easy for any decent human being. It is easy to include the survivors in the circle of caring of the community. However, what about getting inside the head of the killer? What about getting inside the heart of what is left of the heart of the killer? Some people would deny this is a human being sitting on death row; and no one is proposing to let dangerous men (or women) out of jail. Dr Garbarino has made his life’s work discovering the humanity within. The journey is both confronting and inspiring. How did you get here – death row or life in prison without parole? What do you think happened? Join me for a fascinating and engaging conversation as let Jim inform our listening – to killers.

Join Lou Agosta for a conversation with special guest, David How, about David's book Empathy: What It Is and Why It Matters. We will inquire into the deep history of empathy in the evolution of the species; the empathic brain; how empathy develops in children – and in the community; individual differences in the level of empathy; what happens when empathy is absent or missing; the role of empathy in psychotherapy and the helping professions; empathy, morality, and pro-social behavior. We will explore the idea that empathy humanizes people and their relationships – that empathy is about our shared humanity. The includes but is bigger than the idea that an experience of feeling is communicated for the one person to the other. Without the other person, one loses one’s humanity. One is left without vitality, aliveness, or energy. In short, one is left depressed. This is the book I wish I had written. In empathy, one is simply in the presence of another person.

Join Lou Agosta for a conversation with Dan McDuff (http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~djmcduff), Principal Scientist at Affectiva (www.affectiva.com), a software company that is transforming our understanding of the expression of emotions in the human face. The human face is an emotional “hot spot”. New-born babies seem to gravitate spontaneously towards the face of the caretaker. The face forms a total configuration that manifests a person’s humanity in a way especially engaging to another person. We humans seem to be hard-wired to interact with faces as the location for emotional expression – and the lack of expression. Innovations in machine vision and pattern recognition are advancing the automated understanding of the expression of human emotions. Affectiva was founded in 2009 by Rana el Kaliouby and Rosalind W. Picard, scientists at the MIT Media Lab. Listeners will have an opportunity to phone in with questions for Dan and Lou about understanding the emotions.