I&#x27;m not Jessica (just a guy on HN), but I do want to add that my social radar increased a bit by doing Vipassana meditation (= body-scan meditation). Or perhaps I should say social intelligence, since I didn&#x27;t look at the character of people, but I felt what people were feeling quite intensely.<p>Body-scan meditation allows for the insula in your brain to develop (more than normal). Note that the insula maps to the body in a visceral sense. In my experience, this results in that everything that you will see you will also feel. So that means when you see a facial expression, you will feel it as well in a quite intense fashion. The most interesting example was when my best friend went to the movie Oblivion the evening after a 10 day meditation retreat. He told me he felt like he was in it.<p>Caveat: you do need to meditate (aka &#x27;feel your body&#x27;) every day to keep up this level of &#x27;social intelligence&#x27; (for lack of a better word).<p>If you&#x27;d want to know more about it, search for: Search Inside Yourself written by Chade-Meng Tan. He worked as a software engineer Google and writes from a software engineer&#x27;s mind.