Yesterday I talked about the classroom effect (as named by dear Felicity) which causes those of us of a nerdish hue to respond to any question as though we were in an oral exam and would be graded on the accuracy and the thoroughness of our answers.

But there is another factor that causes us nerds to fail to know when to lie, or when to simply be gentle for that matter, and that is our lack of social empathy.

Recognizing the moments when you should probably not be totally blunt takes an understanding of others and their situation that is often lacking in us nerdly types. It is not that we are malicious or callous or cruel (usually), although that is how we appear to others sometimes.

It’s just that the information we need comes from the social empathy circuit of our brains. We have to open our hearts to the feelings of others and do our best to truly understand their situation from their point of view.

This ability is sometimes referred to as theory of mind, which it is, but being of a more poetic bent I would prefer to call it theory of heart.

I call it that to distinguish it from the cold, analytical, objective kind of understanding of others that is a product of the intellect more than our empathy and which can often seem like empathy because it yields a very powerful and insightful form of analysis that can easily pass for a true understanding of one’s fellow humans.

But that is not the same as empathy, because empathy is emotional, not rational. Cold analysis might lead you to think you understand people, but only via opening your heart to others and feeling what they feel can you truly understand what another person is going through and why.

And we nerds are very bad at opening our hearts. We have highly energetic and curious minds which are ready to embrace all kinds of novel ideas, but our hearts tend to be closed tight and riveted shut. Bullying is partly to blame, but a lot of it comes simply from having a mind that is very good at the sort of symbolic logic and abstract thinking skills that are valued by the modern education system.

Our minds are powerful tools, and like all powerful tools, it tends to overwhelm one’s other gifts and become one’s primary way of dealing with the world. Being bright and mentally agile allows one to produce very convincing simulations of things like wisdom and emotional growth, but without social empathy’s input, the same input that is vital in the psychosocial development of average people, the real person behind all that mental horsepower gets lost in the maze of their own mind.

So nerds are excessively blunt and socially tone-deaf partly because of the classroom mentality, but also because they have grown up using their big brains for everything, and that is great for being smart but not so great for being sensitive, socially intelligent, or for that matter, happy.

Now that we have established the problem, we must ask if there is any solution. And perhaps this comes purely from a certain sort of native optimism, but I think there is.

Call it empathy training. We are lucky in that unless one is actually autistic, all the hardware for active empathy is still right there and working fine, we nerds have just been ignoring the signals from it and considering it noise that interferes with our mentation and “objectivity”.

The first step is to fully and completely accept other people’s right to be completely different from you. This is no mere intellectual act of rationally deciding that pluralism is best for all concerned.

You must give these people full permission to be unlike you. That means you can no longer consider “normal” people to be stupid, or defective, or weak, or a bunch of mindless sheeple, or any of that.

It will not be easy to surrender these judgments because we nerds use them as a shield against the normal world, a way of keeping ourselves separate from those that we have all too often learned to think of as “the enemy”.

To lower our shields, then, is to let these people in, where they can hurt us again. I know how hard that is. I am still working on it myself. But in order to make use of your empathetic powers, you will have to lower your mental defenses at least some of the time.

After all, your social antennae are useless if you keep them in an emotional Faraday cage.

Once you have emotionally decloaked, the next step is to learn to accept and truly believe the following precept : every action by every human being makes sense from their point of view.

Human beings are not random, unpredictable, arbitrary, or completely irrational. Even a psychotically insane person in the midst of a severe break from reality is doing what makes sense to them according to what they are experiencing.

when you think about it, this is logically obvious. Some humans are perfectly capable of understanding and predicting the behaviour of others. Therefore, it cannot be random or arbitrary. There must be a form of order to it, otherwise we would have to posit the existence of magic in order to explain this ability.

And you know, Occam’s Razor.

Once you accept that other people are valid and it is possible to understand them, you are ready to truly open your heart to others and finally start picking up the social signal you have been treating as noise for so long.

And who knows, once you do that, you might even begin to understand and forgive your own emotional nature, and forge a better connection not just with others but with yourself.

And that can only lead to greater understanding, emotional health, and happiness for the rest of your life.

And what could be more logical than that?

Remember, you can’t live your life like you’re not personally involved!

Talk to you tomorrow, folks!