Two specific areas of our brain would seem to largely determine a person’s tendency to behave altruistically: a curious and fascinating scientific research guided by East China Normal University highlighted how, by stimulating these areas, this behavior could even be induced, which – according to the results – would not only be the result of natural nature.
As the researchers note, even though parents raise their children to be kind and share, to think about others and their needs (in other words, to be altruistic), while some people grow up dedicated to others, others still manage to grow up selfish.
To understand which brain areas and connections underlie individual differences in altruism, the researchers asked 44 participants to complete 540 decisions in a Dictator Gamewhich is a game designed to assess how individuals respond to situations where self-interest and equality conflict.
In this specific case, the scientists offered volunteers to split a sum of money with someone else, which they could then keep: in particular, each time the participant could earn more or less money than their partner, but the amounts varied.
And, while the participants played, the researchers induced transcranial alternating current stimulation on the frontal and parietal lobes, set to cause the brain cells in those areas to activate simultaneously in repetitive patterns, training them all at gamma or alpha oscillation rhythms.
The authors thus found that during alternating current stimulation, designed to improve the synchrony of gamma oscillations in the frontal and parietal lobes, participants were slightly more likely to make an altruistic choice and offer more money to someone else, even when they would have earned less than their partner.
At this point, using a computational model, the researchers demonstrated that the stimulation induced altruistic preferences in the participants, pushing them to consider their partner more highly as they evaluated each monetary offer.
However, the researchers noted that they did not directly record brain activity during the tests, so future studies should combine brain stimulation with electroencephalography to show the direct effect of stimulation on neural activity.
But the findings suggest that altruistic choices may have a basis in the synchronized activity of the brain’s frontal and parietal lobes.
We have identified a pattern of communication between brain regions linked to altruistic choices – explains Christian Ruff, co-author of the research – This improves our basic understanding of how the brain supports social decisions and lays the foundation for future research on cooperation, especially in situations where success depends on collaboration between people
And the opposite was also true.
What’s new is the evidence of cause and effect: when we altered communication in a specific brain network using targeted, non-invasive stimulation – reports Jie Hu, another co-author – people’s sharing decisions changed consistently, changing the way they balanced their own interests with those of others
The work was published on PLOS Biology.
Sources: EurekAlert / PLOS Biology
