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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.'"
By my interpretation, it's not about helping others because it makes ME feel good. Rand was, rather, about that it is right to help others when I FEEL IT IS RIGHT. And as a further point, that helping is voluntary, which makes the point that it deserves thanks.
In other words: The polar opposite of a Randist is someone who believes it is obligatory to help someone who hates you and would kill you if they can, and due to its obligatory nature you don't deserve any thanks - you rather just deserve hatred if you don't, and even the request for a show of appreciation should lead to hatred against yourself (because that means your motivation was motivation X, 'wanting appreciation', instead of motivation Y, 'fulfilling the duty and obligation that the universe has placed on you').
The Randist rather believes you can choose not to help people you feel are, by your standard, extreme dicks and assholes, that if someone forces you to do so you can resist them, and if you do, you should be thanked for it.
I'm generally very happy to help others. But having seen the bottomless depths of revolting, agonisingly disgusting shit that exist in people (and exemplified everywhere, even in threads such as this, by people established in society) I am increasingly becoming of exactly who I am helping or hindering in my daily life. I know exactly who I hate and would die before lifting a finger for them, or rather, prefer that they did. Let's see who does.
It is time for the major science journals to fuck off and die, you can't read that paper unless you pony over $30 to the cunts that run Nature as a profit-making venture. Yes, Nature publishes great research, yes someone has to co-ordinate reviewers etc, yes it costs money to publish their dead-tree, but that is an exorbitant price. Scientific journals contain work that in most cases rests upon a base of tax-payer funded science (as it should be) and the scientists in those disciplines belong to large organisations (e.g. AAAS) that could easily publish their own online journals, cutting out the middlemen of the dead-tree publishers. The physicists got their act together, why can't other academics. $30 !! Fucking cunts!!