I was listening to NPR (National Public Radio) on my way to work yesterday and heard a story that caught my attention. Did you ever think that magnets and morality could be related? According to a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences a person’s moral judgments can be changed almost instantly by delivering a magnetic pulse to an area of the brain near the right ear.
People in the study read stories designed to produce moral judgments. One such story begins with a woman named Grace putting powder in her friend’s coffee. After that, the story can go in several different directions.
In one version, Grace believes she’s putting sugar in her friend’s coffee. But it turns out to be poison and her friend dies. In another version, Grace believes she’s putting poison in the coffee but it turns out to be sugar and her friend is fine.
“People who hear these stories generally forgive Grace for unwittingly poisoning her friend”, says Liane Young, a researcher in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “They usually condemn Grace for the failed attempt to do harm”.
“We judge people not just for what they do, but what they’re thinking at the time of their action, what they’re intending,” Young says. But, she says, a brief magnetic pulse was able to change that.
Young and her colleagues used a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS, to temporarily decrease activity in an area of the brain called the right temporoparietal junction. It’s near the surface of the brain, above and behind the right ear, and it seems to helps us decipher another person’s beliefs.
“If no harm was done, then subjects would judge [Grace's behavior] as OK,” she says, even if the story made it clear Grace was trying to poison her friend. That’s the sort of moral judgment you often see in kids who are 3 or 4 years old, Young says.
Studies show that at this age, children will usually say a child who breaks five teacups accidentally is naughtier than a child who breaks one teacup on purpose, she says. That’s probably because their brains are still developing the ability to understand the intentions of other people.
The fact that scientists can adjust morality with a magnet may be disconcerting to people who view morality as a lofty and immutable human trait, says Joshua Greene, psychologist at Harvard University. But that view isn’t accurate, he says.
“Moral judgment is just a brain process,” he says. “That’s precisely why it’s possible for these researchers to influence it using electromagnetic pulses on the surface of the brain.”
If something as complex as morality has a mechanical explanation, Greene says, it will be hard to argue that people have, or need, a soul.
Now, leaving the soul and spirituality aside, I think we are reaching a point where we are starting to understand how our brains actually work. Truth is that we are bio-chemical machines (very complex ones) and as such, we can be altered/sabotaged by other machines. Our psyches, the immaterial parts of our selves are being displaced in scientific publications by a waterfall of hard scientific data and breakthroughs causing that previously uncontested concepts like free will and self determination are starting to be questioned.
Moral judgments are a product of our cultural and genetic evolution as a species. They’ve been tailored and transformed to match our different environments and the circumstances that arise from them. In that sense, we’ll always be slaves of our heritage (both cultural and genetic). The problem is that discoveries such as these create narcissistic wounds in our collective perception of us as human beings and… what space is left for individuality?How do we argue now that the choices we make are objective, well thought and unbiased if it turns out that we are just highly complex robots that respond to mechanisms beyond our control? I should ask Freud this question, see what he says… the old man said some crazy things but was soooo right on others. Freud said that there had been three great humiliations in human history: Galileo’s discovery that we were not the center of the universe, Darwin’s discovery that we were not the crown of creation, and his own discovery that we are not in control of our own minds.
This is one of those posts where making a conclusion would be pointless for the mere fact that I’m too far away from the truth. Maybe it’s a truth that eludes all humans. The discussion of free will versus determinism has been in mankind’s literature since the dawn of history, maybe this one’s just another (more futuristic) flavor of it.
Image credit, Topnews
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Article by Fernando
The guy in charge of this blog - husband, Psychologist, former Manager, Blogger, Job Coach, Recruiter and Information Junkie. Yes, I am all that.
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