Great arti­cle in this week’s The Econ­o­mist on The joy of giv­ing: Donat­ing to char­ity rewards the brain. Some quotes:

“Researchers at the National Insti­tute of Neu­ro­log­i­cal Dis­or­ders and Stroke in Bethesda, Mary­land, wanted to find the neural basis for unselfish acts. They decided to peek into the brains of 19 vol­un­teers who were choos­ing whether to give money to char­ity, or keep it for them­selves. To do so, they used a stan­dard tech­nique called func­tional mag­netic res­o­nance imag­ing, which can map the activ­ity of the var­i­ous parts of the brain. The results were reported in this week’s Pro­ceed­ings of the National Acad­emy of Sci­ences.”

…
“the researchers were able to exam­ine what went on inside each person’s head as they made deci­sions based on moral beliefs. They found that the part of the brain that was active when a per­son donated hap­pened to be the brain’s reward centre—the mesolim­bic path­way, to give it its proper name—responsible for dol­ing out the dopamine-mediated eupho­ria asso­ci­ated with sex, money, food and drugs. Thus the warm glow that accom­pa­nies char­i­ta­ble giv­ing has a phys­i­o­log­i­cal basis.“
…
“Donat­ing also engaged the part of the brain that plays a role in the bond­ing behav­iour between mother and child, and in roman­tic love. This involves oxy­tocin, a hor­mone that increases trust and co-operation.”

You may won­der why the Insti­tute of Neu­ro­log­i­cal Dis­or­ders and Stroke is inves­ti­gat­ing this (hmm, is giv­ing to char­ity a Neu­ro­log­i­cal Dis­or­der?), but the Insti­tute is part of a part­ner­ship called Cog­ni­tive and Emo­tional Health Project: The Healthy Brain, among the National Insti­tute on Aging, the National Insti­tute of Men­tal Health and the Insti­tute of Neu­ro­log­i­cal Dis­or­ders and Stroke, that aims to “assess the state of epi­demi­o­logic research on demo­graphic, social and bio­logic deter­mi­nants of cog­ni­tive and emo­tional health in aging pop­u­la­tions, and the path­ways by which cog­ni­tive and emo­tional health may rec­i­p­ro­cally influ­ence each other. As a first step, a com­pre­hen­sive review of mea­sures that have been (or could be) used in epi­demi­o­logic research was under­taken. Mea­sures in four domains are reviewed: (1) cog­ni­tive health, (2) emo­tional health, (3) demographic/social fac­tors, and (4) biomedical/physiologic factors.”

Proven. Another mus­cle to train in a good Brain and Mind Fit­ness Pro­gram. Giv­ing to char­i­ties we care about, and doing unselfish acts.

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