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

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

[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.