Thanks is a reward handed over to someone else. An empathic gift.Giving thanks might have begun in religious faith. "Thank God!" is one of our most frequent utterances. "Thank God" is a kind of prayer reversal — acknowledging the hope, incipient and insubstantial, that an intervention will (or has) provided aid or comfort or safety.As children, we are instructed to thank others for a meal, a gift, a favor. Here thanks is plied as obligatory. Behind the failure to give thanks is a reprimand. And the exchange between the giver and the receiver becomes a bond of mutuality. But not love. One doesn't thank the person that just shared a kiss or a sexual embrace. Yet thanks stands on the base of empathy. People who rob you or molest you or rape you or cheat you have no concern about your feelings, your needs, your life. Psychopaths apparently have no active empathy brain center. As detailed in my book, Leading the Lambs, psychopaths will go to almost any length - even gruesome murder -- to protect themselves from discovery. Psychopaths will suffer their own shame and humiliation; they just never can care about anyone else's.For the rest of us, empathy keeps such bad behavior in check.Thanks is the signpost signaling, verbalizing that empathy is the foundation of probity. Saying "thanks" confirms that empathy is in play.When that confirmation is ignored, when someone acts selfishly and disregards our feelings, we are likely to say, "Thanks for nothing." Which is a rebuke as well as an announcement that probity has been violated.So the message behind Thanksgiving, the holiday, implies a mutual accord and mutual exchange of empathic good feelings between foreign settlers and kind-spirited native Americans. Whether or not such a celebration and feast ever took place, Thanksgiving and its mythological reproductions (from school plays to department store window displays), is a mask to shield us from remembering the genocide we committed on those native Americans..

It's about social positioning, social status, subtle semantic cues, and an implicitly low level of emotionality.

.So thanking is encircled by cultural ironies that even play out in commonplace exchanges. We thank flight attendants and bathroom attendants, not meaning to really give them thanks but to acknowledge their willingness to serve us. We do such thanking to salve our own selves, to feel right about having engaged in a lop-sided exchange where we stand superior to them. It's a watered-down, drivel level form of noblesse oblige.Is there some neurobiological interplay in the brain between amatory responsive centers and the regret center that chooses a less desirable action to prevent disappointment? How does neuroscience explain thanking, a function so universal and so socially important?The answer awaits the interest and funding necessary to attempt such a study. But there is no apparent need or payoff in sight. Empathy, because it underlies both autism and psychopathy—though very differently—is being studied.But thanking, while it operates through empathy, is also more complex and also more exquisitely subtle. It's about social positioning, social status, tenuous semantic cues, and an implicitly low level of emotionality.Giving and receiving thanks rarely raises anyone's emotional temperature. Except in moments of dire need or intensely congenial offering. Thanking is thus a form of mild verbal stroking. Much like a light touch or gentle tap, uttering a word of thanks conveys a sense of momentary mutual connectivity.Giving and receiving thanks rehearses, again and again, the social linkage that battens down isolation and alienation. Those social breaches continually pull at the integrity of society.  Already social media has sped past face-to-face opportunities to solicit thanking. Indeed, the digital revolution has eclipsed large segments of in-person contacts. Not long ago one could enter a college-town coffee shop and find the din of conversation almost overwhelming. Today the same coffee shop, filled with people staring at and typing into their laptops, is dead silent. You might give thanks when someone accords you a space to sit, but your thanks are likely to go unnoticed, to be ignored. They hardly know you. They haven't actually seen you.Is civility in peril? Social indifference may eventually lead to greater social divisiveness. Draining the quiet flow of empathy as serviced by thanking is fashioning a kind of autistic culture. We need thanking to maintain and also demonstrate that integral emotional vascularity. Thanking is like a culture's red blood cells quietly oxygenating the body politic with interpersonal rectitude.Thank you for reading.