The News
Morality might be hard-wired in brain
By Shankar Vedantam The Washington Post
Article Last Updated: 05/28/2007 10:59:57 PM MDT
Washington - The e-mail came from the next room.
"You gotta see this!" Jorge Moll had written.
Moll and Jordan Grafman, neuroscientists at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., had been scanning the brains of volunteers as they were asked to think about a scenario involving either donating a sum of money to charity or keeping it for themselves.
The results were showing that when volunteers put the interests of others before their own, that activated a primitive part of the brain that usually lights up in response to food or sex.
Altruism, the test suggested, was not a superior moral faculty that suppresses basic selfish urges but was basic to the brain, hard-wired and pleasurable.
Their 2006 finding that unselfishness can feel good lends scientific support to the admonitions of spiritual leaders such as St. Francis of Assisi, who said: "For it is in giving that we receive."
But it is also a dramatic example of the way neuroscience has begun to elbow its way into discussions about morality and has opened up a new window on what it means to be good.

The Research
Read the research behind this story in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.