On the occasions when we humans go out of our way to help another person who is in distress, we are acting out our biological inheritance. And if we don’t help someone in trouble, that’s because we’ve had to actually actively suppress what is natural for us to do. That was the finding of the neurologist Peggy Mason. whom we interviewed in Shape of the World’s second season. We’ve re-released that episode because that particular finding of Peggy’s and the others she spoke about remain incredibly relevant and still come across as a bit shocking. 

As a child, Peggy Mason was a biology prodigy. By the age of nine, she was assisting the zoologist Dr. Charles Handley in teaching taxidermy at the Smithsonian. Today, as a neurobiologist, Peggy still works with mammals, but now she’s studying whether they experience empathy and act to help one another.

Peggy was studying the subject of pain modulation until a post-doctoral student at the University of Chicago, Inbal Ben-Ami Bartal, asked if she’d be interested in expanding her work to collaborate on a project about empathy. “I went over to see her that same day,” says Peggy, and the upshot was the discovery that, like humans, rats have an aversion to witnessing the distress of others and a strong motivation to help someone else who’s suffering.

In addition to leading the research laboratory at the University of Chicago, Peggy is a committed teacher of neurobiology, teaching both formally (at the University) and informally, through her blog and a popular free, online course.

“It’s our biological mammalian inheritance to help. It’s not helping that’s the weird thing.”

– Dr. Peggy Mason is a professor of neurobiology at the University of Chicago.

You’ll love this video from Nova that shows one rat deliberately setting free another rat that’s trapped. Later, the rat is confronted with the question of which to do first: save some rat it had never even met before, or wolf down the chocolate Peggy offered? Also, here’s the article in Science magazine.

On Coursera, take “Understanding the Brain: The Neurobiology of Every Day Life,” a free course taught by Peggy. You can also gain more insights from Peggy by subscribing to her blog, which is fascinating and far-reaching in its subject matter. Her most recent post has the full script of her “Aims of Education” address, a prestigious speech given to incoming students. 

• Rats from Dr. Mason and Dr. Bartal’s trapped-rat empathy experiment. Amazingly, the black-and-white rat will venture into the “danger zone” of the arena to help the trapped rat.
• Photograph of Dr. Mason and Dr. Bartal together.
• Rat-nibbled Hershey’s kisses.
• Electrophysiological recordings of a rat, illustrating how different parts of a rat’s body (the right forepaw, the left hindpaw, etc.) respond to certain stimuli.