What Is A Human Being?
Perhaps this is an odd question because we think that the answer is self evident, like water is wet. What we’ve been told is that one of the elements that helps to distinguish human beings from most other creatures are the set of connectors in our brains called mirror neuron. 
Identifying this system in the brain and understanding how it works is relatively new. Mirror Neurons seem to be responsible for how quickly human beings are able to learn tasks and distribute what’s learned throughout a culture. They are also involved with our heightened sense of self awareness (emotional intelligence) and most importantly empathy. Recently you will recall there was much discussion centered around Supreme Court Nominee Sonia Sotomayor and empathy, and whether or not empathy comes into play when making a decision as a jurist.
Our Depth of Caring
We are not looking to debate what a jurist should or should not do in their roles but rather to start a conversation about fairness, caring, its specialness and power to transform. Often what causes breakdowns in our families, communities, and nations is our self-imposed inability to stand in someone elses shoes in a sense making the choice to deny our connectedness. Instead we relegate our decisions to a fixed history of ourselves and the world that may no longer be relevant or all that important. Another way of thinking about this is we make the choice – even if subconciously – to let our past dictate the future possibility of understanding where the other(s) are “coming from” and what must it be like to be them. Albert Einstein said, “A person starts to live when he can live outside himself.”
“Mirror Neurons dissolve the barrier between self and others”...V.S. Ramachandran. Humans are not the only creatures with mirror neurons but no other species seem to have the same level of empathy that we do. When we say “We Feel Your Pain” we mean it. (I do wonder about this however when I watch what I perceive to be the moods of our dog Vincent.)
When In Doubt ask,”What Would A Human Being Do?”
It would seem that we can come to better decisions by simply asking ourselves the question “what would a human being do.” Then seeking to be empathetic with the other who is not really “the other” but ourselves in a different form. Rooted somewhere in the various definitions of human potential is that we do have the capacity to do more and to positively transform the world and hence our relationships. In the diversity training of managers that I am privileged to deliver, empathy is a key objective of several modules. Lives are changed, businesses grow stronger, and our participants leave with a heightened sense of what it means to be human.
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