MACROSCOPE
The Soul of Science
Michael Shermer
The Pleasure of Purpose
How can we attain deep-time awareness and global consciousness when
our sense of purpose is grounded in an ancient evolutionary
heritage? Thomas Jefferson suggested one answer in a letter to
Thomas Law in 1814: "These good acts give pleasure, but how it
happens that they give us pleasure? Because nature hath implanted in
our breasts a love of others, a sense of duty to them, a moral
instinct, in short, which prompts us irresistibly to feel and to
succor their distresses." Scientific research supports this
proposition. Experiments with the "prisoner's
dilemma"—a game in which one person's cooperation or
defection elicits a varying payoff depending on whether the other
person cooperates or defects—reveal that subjects adopt a
cooperative strategy after multiple rounds, particularly when they
can interact to establish trust. Usually, the most selfish thing to
do—that is, gain the most in the long run—is to begin by
trusting and cooperating, and then do whatever your partner does.
Trust ... with verification.
Our brains reinforce cooperative behavior. In one study by James
Rilling and colleagues at Emory University, subjects that played the
prisoner's dilemma while undergoing functional magnetic resonance
imaging (fMRI) showed that cooperation activated the same brain
areas as desserts, cocaine, beautiful faces and other pleasures.
These responsive areas, the anteroventral striatum (the so-called
"pleasure center," for which rats will endlessly press a
bar to have it stimulated, even foregoing food) and the
orbitofrontal cortex (related to impulse control and reward
processing), are rich in dopamine, a neurochemical related to
addictive behaviors. Tellingly, the cooperative subjects reported
increased feelings of trust toward and camaraderie with their game
partners. In addition to dopamine, neuroscientists believe that
oxytocin—a hormone produced during eating, breast feeding and
sexual orgasm—plays a vital role in human bonding and
prosocial behaviors. Can we use this knowledge to accentuate
purposeful behavior at the personal and global levels?
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