Occupy Empathy Movement – Scenes from the Empathy Tent March 7, 2015. Downtown Berkeley BART Station  

Join the movement at:

http://cultureofempathy.com/OccupyEmpathy/

We set up the ‪#‎Empathy‬ Movement Tent last Saturday in Berkeley. The idea is to set up consistently ever Saturday as weather allows, and maybe one or two other days a week and slowly scale up as we build support.

I got a new video camera and took some video of the tent. See the video below. Jun and I were doing some Empathic Design (human-center design) project to see how we could redesign the tent to be more engaging.

Also, a new idea for engagement was the Empathy in the Eyes test. People could stop and take the test. This got a lot of people to stop and get involved.

The political role of empathy sometimes comes in for criticism, particularly among conservatives. “I feel your pain” smacks of too much Clinton, too much Oprah. Empathy is dismissed as a source of naive, counterproductive public policy, which it can be…

Stories stimulate the brain. Metaphors like “He had leathery hands” rouse the sensory cortex.   Scientists call this capacity of the brain to construct a map of other people’s intentions “theory of mind.” Narratives …

The simple act of listening may be one of the most effective and least expensive medicines around.   Sometimes the best “medicine” is simply becoming an empathetic, compassionate listener.”  Rev. Alisdair Smith, co-founder of the Greater Vanc…