Altruism turns out to be... altruistic

Why Do Good? Brain Study Offers Clues

By E.J. Mundell, HealthDay Reporter
posted: 22 January 2007

(HealthDay News) -- People may not perform selfless acts just for an
emotional reward, a new brain study suggests.

Instead, they may do good because they're acutely tuned into the needs
and actions of others.

Sordo...

Now you know what drives me to satisfy your needs, Elaine.....

Scientists say a piece of the brain linked to perceiving others'
intentions shows more activity in unselfish vs. selfish types.

"Perhaps altruism did not grow out of a warm-glow feeling of doing good
for others, but out of the simple recognition that that thing over
there is a person that has intentions and goals. And therefore, I might
want to treat them like I might want them to treat myself," explained
study author Scott Huettel, an associate professor of psychology at
Duke University Medical Center, in Durham, N.C.

He and lead researcher Dharol Tankersley, a graduate student at Duke,
published their findings in the Jan. 21 online issue of Nature
Neuroscience.

For decades, psychologists and neuroscientists have puzzled over the
tendency of humans to engage in altruistic acts -- defined by Huettel's
group as acts "that intentionally benefit another organism, incur no
direct personal benefit, and sometimes bear a personal cost."

Experts note that altruism doesn't seem to provide individuals with any
survival edge, so how and why did it evolve?

To help solve that puzzle, Heuttel's team had a group of healthy young
adults either engage in a computer game or watch as the computer played
the game itself. In some sessions, the computer and participants played
for personal gain, while in other sessions, they played for charity.

The researchers used high-tech functional MRI (fMRI) to observe "hot
spots" of activity in the participants' brains as they engaged in these
tasks.

Participants were also asked to complete a questionnaire aimed at
assessing their personal levels of selfishness or altruism.

Huettel said he was surprised by the study results.

"We went into this experiment with the idea that altruism was really a
function of the brain's reward systems -- altruistic people would
simply find it more rewarding," he said.

But instead, a whole other brain region, called the posterior superior
temporal cortex (pSTC), kicked into high gear as altruism levels rose.

The pSTC is located near the back of the brain and is not focused on
reward. Instead, it focuses on perceiving others' intentions and
actions, Huettel said.

"The general function of this region is that it seems to be associated
with perceiving, usually visually, stimuli that seems meaningful to us