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Morality Study Narrows Gap between Mind and Brain - Right Brain Stimulation
| Morality Study Narrows Gap between Mind and Brain From the NPR website: Scientists have found a surprising link between magnets and morality. 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, according to a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 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. And, she says, 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. Back To Childhood Morality 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 <b>...</b> |
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