Altruism and the Brain

There is a fascinating new study which will be out next month in the journal Nature.

Colleagues from Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina, believe that they have found a region of the brain that is associated with altruism: selfless concern for the well-being of others.

Some scientists have claimed that it is of no value because it has no survival advantage. I’ve never been able to agree with that extreme position. Another view is that the survival advantage comes from an ability to perceive the intention of others and therefore to anticipate their actions. I’m also not certain that this is genuine altruism, in the sense that altruism should be selfless.

45 volunteers were asked to play a computer game and also to watch the computer play the game. In some instances successful completion of the game resulted in the volunteers winning money for themselves, and in other instances it resulted in money being donated to a charity that each person had chosen at the beginning of the experiment. During these games the researchers took functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans of the participants’ brains.

According to the old fashioned – and false – theory that pleasure and pain are THE main drivers of behavior, it was assumed that altruistic acts would activate the reward systems in the brain.

They do not.

A region of the brain called the posterior superior temporal cortex (pSTC) is activated by altruism and is very sensitive to the difference between doing something for personal gain and doing it for someone else’s gain. The pSTC appears to help us tune into perceiving and giving meaning to the actions of others. It is not focused on reward.

In the next stage of the research the participants were asked questions about the type and frequency of their altruistic or helping behaviors. The researchers then analyzed the responses to generate an estimate of a person’s tendency to act altruistically and compared each person’s level against their fMRI brain scan. The results showed that pSTC activity rose in proportion to a person’s estimated level of altruism. Note that it was their estimated level rather than their actual altruistic acts.

The suggestion by the researchers is that the ability to perceive other people’s actions as meaningful is critical for altruism.

I am going to be a Devil’s advocate and interpret the data differently. I think it more likely that people who have a good understanding of social relationships are more likely to do things for other people. Helping other just makes sense to you. Both the tests and the imaging could be interpreted in terms of social understanding and empathy. In other words we are looking at an aspect of social cognition.

There may also be another correlation here. Some years ago we showed that in people with chronic schizophrenia there is a shift in the handedness of a particular region of the brain called the planum temporale, which lies on the top of the temporal lobe. This lead to the hypothesis that when people are hearing voices, they really are hearing something being generated in the right hemisphere of the brain. People with schizophrenia sometimes have trouble with reading other people’s intentions and may attach meaning to random events. This new research mat help us understand why that can happen.

It also makes clinical sense: the best ways of helping people with mental illness who have these problems is to ensure that they are not on medicines that impair their social cognition, and to use social skills training.

“What we have done for ourselves alone dies with us; what we have done for others and the world remains and is immortal.”
–Albert Pike (American Lawyer, Masonic Author and Historian, 1809-1891)

“Spiritual energy flows in thankfulness and produces effects on the phenomenal world.”
–William James (American Psychologist and Philosopher, 1842-1910)