improve reality

just send cash

generosity generates

Generosity is Hardwired Into Our Brains
Washington Post, May 27, 2007

Neuroscientists at the National Institutes of Health have 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 showed that when the volunteers placed the interests of others before their own, the generosity activated a primitive part of the brain that usually lights up in response to food or sex.  

Altruism, the experiment suggests, is not a superior moral faculty that suppresses basic selfish urges but rather is basic to the brain, hard-wired and pleasurable.

~

back to front page