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.
Grafman and others are using brain imaging and psychological experiments to study whether the brain has a built-in moral compass.
The results – many of them published just in recent months – are showing, unexpectedly, that many aspects of morality appear to be hard- wired in the brain, most likely the result of evolutionary processes that began in other species.
It is known that animals can sacrifice their own interests: One experiment found that if each time a rat is given food, its neighbor receives an electric shock, the first rat eventually will forgo eating.
The research enterprise has been viewed with interest by philosophers and theologians, but some worry that it raises troubling questions.
Reducing morality and immorality to brain chemistry – rather than free will – might diminish the importance of personal responsibility.
