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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.'"
I'm sick of being altruistic while selfish bastards get all the money.
This just seems like a very roundabout, tenuous way to find the altruism center. They used an extremely unreliable method -- survey responses -- and then had people play a computer game they *know* is pretend, which would just show how altruistic they are in fake scenarios, which isn't really altruism, just like my willingness to slaughter demons in Doom doesn't show a real "willingness to resort to violence".
Much cheaper way to accomplish the same thing:
-Scan Ayn Rand's brain (Peikoff would be a fine subsititute today if you need a living one).
-Compare to an average human's brain.
-Look for the most striking difference.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
That was really great of them to do this study and share it with us. They didn't even have to do that!
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they will throw themselves on a grenade to save a comrade's life five years hence.
And tell me what's wrong with throwing a comrade on the grenade to save your own, uhh, nevermind...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
You need to brush up on your Ayn Rand. The term "altruist" is used as a derogatory term, and "voluntary altruism" is something to be reviled and weakness.
"Nobody respects an altruist, neither in private life nor in international affairs. An altruist is a person who keeps sacrificing himself and his values, which means: sacrificing his friends to his enemies, his allies to his protagonists, his interests to any cry for help, his strength to anyone's weakness, his convictions to anyone's wishes, the truth to any lie, the good to any evil."
"It stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting sacrificial offerings. Where there's service, there's someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master."
"Just as life is an end in itself, so every living human being is an end in himself, not the means to the ends or the welfare of others - and, therefore, man must live for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself."
To that end, I suggest Ayn Rand was a self-serving bitch.
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.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
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.