The neuroscience of the Pacquiao mania

Being human is a supremely complicated business. Not only do we worry about tomorrow, hate and love each other in the most variety of ways, yearn to be happy and pay high costs to be so, snicker behind each others back, lavish our heroes and heroines with praise or empathize with our neighbors’ situation — we also love to ask how do our brains feel? And for this, we have a special bunch of humans who specialize in making the business of being human even more complicated and they are called scientists. I write about them and what they do every week because I am stuck with glued fascination that they never run out of things to probe and turn over for inspection. This time, the scientists I came across wanted to know how our brains admire and feel compassion.

No, the scientists were not interested to see if we do feel these things because unless you are an alien, it has been observed that even we have phenomenal misses in compassion, we humans are generally capable of compassion and admiration. These neuroscientists, namely Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, Andrea McColl, Hanna Damasio, and Antonio Damasio of the Brain and Creativity Institute, Dornsife Cognitive Neuroscience Imaging Center, and Rossier School of Education, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, published a study entitled “Neural correlates of admiration and compassion” in the early edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in the USA. They wanted to see where in the brain this happens.

What did the scientists see when they saw brains engaged in admiration and compassion? The neuroscientists saw that feelings of admiration and compassion generally go through the same brain parts that control your breathing, heart rate, that butterfly feeling in your gut — the same parts where the feeling of “primal” emotions like anger and fear rages — as they go through other brain parts collectively called posteromedial cortices or PMC, depending on the context of the emotion.

What these scientists saw may explain why admiration for Pacquiao may not simply be part of those headline stories that will simply drop from our memory. First, when we were witnessing the physical prowess of Pacquiao, we were so into it — because we physiologically were living out what it means in breaths and heartbeats. Admiring someone for his extraordinary physical strength affects our breathing, our heart rate and even our respiratory rate. Just remember the reactions of people around Superman, Spiderman or Wolverine and then look at yourselves now in awe of Pacquiao’s skill. The filmmakers have observed fans of people like Pacquiao.

But there is something else that the study revealed that it may not just be what he did in the ring but the whole journey it took for him to get there that really gets our brain glued to Pacquiao’s story. The study showed the difference between the admiration we feel for someone who just had a moral victory and admiration we have for someone with a skill- like an athlete and a musician. The same difference is found between the compassion we feel for someone who has had psychological pain like “loss” and that which we feel for one who has had an injury from an accident. In their study, they found that when it involved physical skill or pain, whether of admiration or compassion, the reaction is very quick and involves some of our brain parts that control our bones and muscles. However, for psychological experiences like that of admiration for someone whose story of being able to overcome great odds to have a moral victory, or for compassion for someone who felt rejected by friends or family, the activity seen in the fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) is four to six seconds later than that triggered by seeing someone in physical pain or exhibiting great physical skill. The activity also lasts significantly longer and goes into brain parts that have to do with our own sense of self which means it also makes us aware of our own journey of overcoming similar obstacles. This means that admiration for virtue, such as that of Pacquiao’s in overcoming extreme poverty through hard work and discipline, goes deeper and lasts longer into our brains than physical admiration for the overpowering skills he exhibited in the ring. I think if the scientists look some more, they may also see that the neural sparks for this kind of deep admiration is also what makes for inspiration.

As far as this science column is concerned, I think Pacquiao has singularly overwhelmed the posteromedial cortices of every Filipino and others. I think this neural marinade will embed Pacquiao’s story in our psyche for a long, long time.

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