Food, Sex, and…Donating Money To Charity?

No Comments | June 15th, 2007 | Trackback

That’s right, according to recent research, “knowing your money is going to a good cause can activate some of the same pleasure centers in your brain as food and sex”.

Researchers carried out various experiments and also found out that while people’s brains got a “thrill” for even for a compulsory donation – such as a tax, they explain – the results were greater when the donation was considered voluntary.

“What is interesting is that these pleasure areas are for really basic needs, like food, sex, sweets, shelter and social connection,” Ulrich said in a telephone interview. “It’s the area that tells the brain what is good for us.”

As it turns out, “That very same brain area not only tracks what is good for us, but what is good for others,” he said.

…and, what is good for others is in fact good for us? Or, it is good for us to help others? I’m extrapolating from this that volunteering is much like donating money, just in a different form.

I can think of a few cynical interpretations for this, but I’d prefer to look at it like this: we don’t generally look at eating or having sex as altruistic (well… most of the time…), and maybe it’s correct for this to influence how we look at volunteering as well. Certainly volunteering when it’s not compulsory says something good about the character of a person and I don’t mean to imply otherwise. But maybe things in general would be better if, instead of looking at volunteering/helping others in need as something above and beyond, we saw it as a normal part of the human experience…and as such, something that everyone would just do.

One final way of looking at it would be to propose that maybe the idea that helping others makes us feel good should not really be all that surprising – and the fact that it is reported as such may tell us more about the current social context than about the brain.