More on sleep, Chile, work, and compassion

It's a line of context, but Dylan is good for that:

Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks when you’re tryin' to be so quiet?
Visions Of Johanna 

As I've mentioned often before, I have a type of insomnia that my mother had. I sleep for a while and then am awake for several hours during the night. Generally, I get back to sleep in the early morning and, with a nap in the early afternoon, do ok.
Two nights ago, I dreamed that I slept a full night. I woke enthusiastically and was then disappointed to learn that it was one in the morning. This past night, I dreamed that I couldn't sleep. I woke at the same time, quietly restarted the fire in the stove (quietly so that I wouldn't wake the dog who no longer sleeps on his bed near the stove) and listened to the BBC coverage of Chilean mine rescue.
As I've very often said, whatever it is that I do, I work hard, but what I do isn't hard work. The major challenge I've had in my work is that I turned my desk 90^° so the afternoon sun isn't shining in my eyes. I didn't have to wait 10 weeks for someone to drill through 700m of stone to rescue me.
Nevertheless, I've found that comparisons rarely help me change how I feel about my situation. In the early 1980s, I went to a doctor with symptoms that I now know were the early signs of depression. "What have you got to be depressed about?" the doctor said. "Look at all those people who are losing their jobs in Detroit." Now I had three things to feel bad about - my initial symptoms, the people in Detroit, and the fact that I didn't feel bad enough about the people in Detroit.
Researchers have shown that different parts of the brain are activated when we show compassion or not in the presence of another's pain. In the sweet language of scientists, we learn that

The researchers concluded that empathy-associated activation of the anterior insula motivated costly helping, whereas a signal in the nucleus accumbens, a brain area related to reward processing, reduced the propensity to help.

via Competing motivational brain responses predict costly helping

I think that this means that the part of my brain that seeks rewards is less compassionate. This suggests that if I'm told that I should be nice to others because it's good for me, I'm less likely to be motivated to do so. Instead, if I perceive someone is part of my group, I'm already predisposed to be willing to relieve their pain.
That's a lot to ponder. And, as the guy says, "I may not be much, but I'm all that I think about."