by Wei XU, Rebecca VINESSE, Angèle PILLOT
Will you donate a kidney to save a stranger’s life? Well there are a group of people who are willing to do this for a complete stranger. Abigail Marsh, a psychology professor of Georgetown University, has had a car accident on the highway one night. A man has saved her life by risking himself’s without even leaving a name. Since then she began to study on the capacity of human beings to care about the others.
According to the theory of evolution, the objective of human instincts is very simple and selfish: survive! Many philosophers share also this point of view. So why human shows altruistic conduct and why some are more altruistic than others? Environmental factor must be a powerful explanation. However what if there is also a neuropsychological explication based on the brain structure?
After being saved by the “Jane Doe”, Abigail Marsh started her study from the opposite pole of altruism – psychopathy who is represented by manipulative and antisocial traits and a lack of empathy. Based on their brain imaging researches, she and her colleagues found that on psychopath adolescents there are three main emotional characteristics. The first one is a poorer recognition of others’ fear which means the lack of compassion. They also found that the amygdala of this population under-reactive to fear and their amygdala size is 18 or 20 % smaller than average. Then she found an outstanding population who can perfectly stand for the word “altruism”. As you may have guessed, those are people who are willing to donate their own healthy kidney to a complete stranger. But don’t be guilty they are only 2000 in whole America. Not to mention the risks of the major surgery they have to go through, only this thought could already frighten the majority of us. So their brain imaging study on these people has shown exactly the opposite results of the above mentioned: they have a better capacity to recognize fear, a more reactive amygdala face to expressions of fear and an 8% bigger sized amygdala.
This is an extraordinary physiological finding for this paradoxical human behavior which can explain this act on a biological level. But there are also some questions to ask in the future studies. For example brain imaging shows the instant state of our brain not its developmental path. Considering epigenetic theories, this could be a structural changing because of altruistic acts they have carried out or educations that they have received. Therefore further researches are highly expected to find out more solid evidence for this interesting thematic.
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