Scientists Find 'Altruistic' Center of the Brain

davidwr writes "A team of researchers at Duke University published a paper linking the brain's posterior superior temporal cortex to altruistic behavior. The BBC also picked up the story. If confirmed this has applications in neurology, psychology, child-rearing, and a host of other domains. From the BBC piece: 'Using brain scans, the US investigators found this region related to a person's real-life unselfish behaviour. The Duke University Medical Center study on 45 volunteers is published in Nature Neuroscience. The participants were asked to disclose how often they engaged in different helping behaviours, such as doing charity work, and were also asked to play a computer game designed to measure altruism.'"

Comments

You've obviously misread Ms. Rand

[Anonymous Coward]

Objectivists and Libertarians think voluntary altruism is entirely ok, i.e. I help other people because it makes ME feel good to do so. What they object to is mandatory altruism, i.e. the government forcing one at gunpoint to support others.

Re:You've obviously misread Ms. Rand

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you mean? He made an assertion about Ayn Rand's obectivist philosphy, and then backed it up with proof--namely, a quote from her. For all you know, he can't stand her overall philosophy. That doesn't mean he can't discuss it and have opinions about it that aren't all "Oh, I disagree with the whole, so I must disagree with every part".

Duke scientists isolated the protein

[Anonymous Coward]

responsible for altruism, and immediately patented it.

Sample size == 45?

[turly]

And they're able to state this from a sample size of 45?

Jesus Christ. I mean, their shoe-size is as likely to correlate to altruism.

Re:Sample size == 45?

[Vellmont]

And they're able to state this from a sample size of 45?

I'm getting a bit tired of this criticism. It really depends on what they're trying to measure if the sample size is statistically significant. If you were an alien from the planet Zenon, you wouldn't need a large sample size of humans to determine there's two sexes. You would need a far large sample size to find trans-gendered people. Obviously because the two different sexes occour in equal numbers (so a small sample is very likely to contain both), whereas trans-gendered people are rare.

Re:One more domain

[m0rph3us0]

What if doing things that are altruistic are bad for the country? Altruism usually fails to recognize the misallocation of resources it is doing because it is "good", and thus makes everyone worse off. See Steel Tarrifs, Medicare, Welfare.

Re:Raises questions

[Lemmy Caution]

The whole claim is built on a suspect modularist model, by which one finds a "center" for everything. High-level behaviors may correspond with certain activations in certain regions in neuro-typical people, but that's by no means the same thing as finding an "x" center, either. It could be that what is being activated is responsible for something far simpler - such as facial recognition, or even the production of affect - but that the altruistic behavior per se is considerably more distributed. The remarkable plasticity of brain function suggests that this search for "x" centers is fraught with problems.

Re:Moo

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

Firstly, 45 is not enough for a statistical analysis involving brain scans

Clearly you are unfamiliar with statistics or you'd never make such a ridiculous claim. Firstly, statistical analysis is agnostic about its subject matter. Whether or not its about "brain scans" or predicting the weather has no bearing on what's a good sample size. Secondly, you measure whether or not a sample size is good enough by looking at the statistical significance, not the absolute size of the sample. In an extreme case, if 50% of people were altruistic (by some measure), and you could predict this perfectly form a "brain scan" then this would be so statistically significant that it would be off the scale. In fact, it'd be pretty significant with only a sample size of 10.

Being self-concious would have an obvious affect (sic) on altruistic tendencies.

You really don't get it do you. If you find a statistically significant correlation, you find a statistically significant correlation. If it's significant enough, you can be confident that there's some kind of causal mechnanism at work (though what is cause and what is effect may be hard to determine). These people now have some information that gives them predictive power.

While it is true that we are born selfish, Freud...

Now who's talking junk science?

Why should thinking of others be altruistic?

[shaitand]

Is it still altruism if you do something to advance the colony? What if it is because you identify the colony as an extension of yourself? Those who believe in altruism as a natural thing might be inclined to jump on this selfless bandwagon. I see no reason to believe that this region of the brain is associated with anything more than base functions of social and group interaction. If you identify yourself as part of a group then actions to benefit that group are merely selfishness on another level.

Furthermore, in a general sense, helping others is merely promote self interest. Say you are nice to people at the office and help them out whenever possible. When you take these actions there may not be a specific self interest in mind at the moment but you are aware that you are building goodwill toward yourself that may benefit you when you in turn need help.

Re:One more domain

[RexRhino]

The most vicious and dangerous people in the world are true believers trying to do the right thing. The corrupt and greedy usually have limits - they just want to get rich quick and that is that. The people willing to engage in true stupidy, cruelity, and destruction, are the people who are convinced they are doing the right thing.

Re:Moo

[radtea]

While it is true that we are born selfish...

What on Earth does this mean?

We are social primates, and therefore have evolved a variety of reciprocal-aid mechanisms in our behaviour. We are more likely to show helping behaviour toward our closer kin, but because we also (as a species) practice exogamy (breeding outside our kin group) rather vigorously we have a tendency to show helping behaviour toward anyone or anything that even looks remotely like us.

When raised in sufficiently violent, unloving circumstances that tendency may never be developed, but contra Freud it is not repression of our nature that makes us humane (anymore than feral, asocialized humans behave humanely) but rather a nurturing, loving and secure upbringing.

Re:Moo

[venicebeach]

Firstly, 45 is not enough for a statistical analysis involving brain scans, there is enough multiplicity as it is, there was bound to be *some* congruence. Seriously, they are making predictions from 45 people?!?!

IAAFR (I am an fMRI researcher) and I can say without reservation that this comment is blatantly incorrect. As with any statistical analsysis, you take into account the variability in the data when making statistical tests. You have some idea of what to expect based on chance alone, and you must exceed that by a tremendous amount. With fMRI we tend to be excessively conservative with statistics, since we do a statistical test at every voxel in the image acquired -- it takes very high levels of statistical parameters to be accepted as a significant result.

45 subjects is actually a very large sample for an imaging study (fMRI is very expensive). Most studies use 12-16 people.

As for the term "volunteers", anyone who participates in research in the U.S. is a volunteer. We cannot and should not force people to participate in research studies. The term volunteer does not mean they were not compensated for their time.