Hey, it's Guy here. So in this episode, you're going to hear how a psychiatrist interviewed

26 convicted murderers at a Texas prison and found that all 26 of them had something surprising

in common, not a single one of them had a healthy amount of play as a young kid. This episode

press play originally aired in March of 2015. This is the Ted Radio Hour. Each week,

groundbreaking TED Talks. Ted Technology Entertainment Design. Is that really what's

10 for us? I've never known the delivered at TED conferences around the world. It's the gift

of the human imagination. We've had to believe in impossible things. The true nature of reality

beckons from just beyond those talks, those ideas adapted for radio from NPR.

I'm Guy Ross. Here's a question to start to show with. Why is it sometimes so hard to feel

empathy for strangers? Because you're stressed by them. You're stressed by them? Yeah. And I think

this is something that people don't think about a lot, but it's true. This is Jeff Mogul. He's

a neuroscientist at McGill University in Canada. I mean, for most of the history of our species,

we were living in groups of 100 people or so. We knew all of them, and we didn't have empathy

for strangers, but that was fine because we barely ever saw any strangers. Which is why today,

if you take any two strangers and you put them in a room together, as Jeff did in a recent

study. You know, they weren't doing anything. They weren't competing in any way. But the very fact

that you took two people and stuck them in a room and closed the door increased stress levels

in both of them. It increased their heart rates and made their palm sweaty because you're trying

to figure out if you can trust them. You're trying to see if you have anything in common. It's harder

to relate to them, to talk to them when you don't have any familiarity. This is Jane McGill. She's a

video game designer and Jane told us about Jeff's study. The great new study that just came out

a couple of weeks ago. And Jeff wanted to test out the hypothesis that being around strangers

...