The Biology Of Altruism: Good Deeds May Be Rooted In The Brain
September 22,
2014 3:32 AM ET
3 min 36 sec
Rob Donnelly for NPR
Four years ago, Angela
Stimpson agreed to donate a kidney to a complete stranger.
"The only thing I knew
about my recipient was that she was a female and she lived in Bakersfield,
Calif.," Stimpson says.
It was a true act of
altruism — Stimpson risked pain and suffering to help another. So why did she
do it? It involved major surgery, her donation was anonymous and she wasn't
paid.
"At that time in my
life, I was 42 years old. I was single, I had no children," Stimpson says.
"I loved my life, but I would often question what my purpose is."
Angela Stimpson smiles
before surgery to donate a kidney on Sept. 22, 2010, at Weill-Cornell Hospital
in New York.
Courtesy of Angela Stimpson
When she read about the
desperate need for kidneys, Stimpson, a graphic artist who lives in Albany,
N.Y., says she found her purpose. She now blogs about
her experience and encourages others to become donors.
People like Stimpson are
"extraordinary altruists," according to Abigail Marsh. She's an
associate professor of psychology at Georgetown University and one of the
country's leading researchers into altruism.
Marsh herself was the
beneficiary of extraordinary altruism when she was 20. She got into a freak
highway accident and ended up stalled in the fast lane facing oncoming traffic.
A man dodged traffic to come to her aid and help get her car started. He saved
her life, she says, then disappeared before she could ask his name.
Marsh wanted to know more
about this type of extraordinary altruism, so she decided to study the brains
of people who had donated a kidney to a stranger. Of the 39 people who took
part in the study,
19 of them, including Angela Stimpson, were kidney donors.
Marsh took structural images
to measure the size of different parts of their brains and then asked the
participants to run through a series of computer tests while their brains were
being scanned using functional MRI. In one test, they were asked to look at
pictures of different facial expressions, including happiness, fear, anger, sadness
and surprise.
Most of the tests didn't
find any differences between the brains of the altruistic donors and the people
who had not been donors. Except, Marsh says, for a significant difference in a
part of the brain called the amygdala,
an almond-shaped cluster of nerves that is important in processing emotion.
The amygdala was
significantly larger in the altruists compared to those who had never donated
an organ. Additionally, the amygdala in the altruists was extremely sensitive
to the pictures of people displaying fear or distress.
These findings are the polar
opposite to research Marsh
conducted on a group of psychopaths. Using the same tests as with the
altruists, Marsh found that psychopaths have significantly smaller, less active
amygdalas. More evidence that the amygdala may be the brain's emotional
compass, super-sensitive in altruists and blunted in psychopaths, who seem
unresponsive to someone else's distress or fear.
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