Can you train your brain to be more compassionate?

HELEN WENG 

We found changes in regions associated with empathy, emotion regulation and reward processing.

But can compassion be learned through practice?

As a graduate student I designed and conducted a study testing this exact hypothesis: that we can become more compassionate through practicing meditation, and that this will result in more kind acts towards others. I hypothesized this wouldn’t take extreme amounts of practice. 

As part of the study, people from the Madison, Wisconsin community practiced just 30 minutes a day for two weeks, like a new exercise regime.