Sun Poisoning Vs Heat Rash

Neurosciences and behavior: roots of empathy and morality

key Unraveling social behavior. The neurosciences are beginning to provide answers to questions such as why we cry, we help others or altruistic gestures.


Nora Bär
THE NATION, November 8, 2009


In "A Clockwork Orange, Stanley Kubrick, a group of young people milling around the city to stick to their victims. The scene of fiction, dark parable that in 1971 he approached the chilling violence of certain current events, it seemed justifiable only by the imagination of the novelist who designed the plot: Anthony Burgess. However, a couple of years ago, the French neurobiologist Jean Decety discovered that if they showed adolescents with behavioral problems videos of people beaten, activated brain circuits for empathy, but also the centers of pleasure ...

Aggression, empathy, concern for others, altruism, ethics and morality are central gears of life of our societies. In recent years neuroscience has begun to unravel these complex cognitive processes that link us with our family and our posterity, and society as a whole. Some of the leading players in this real "revolution of the brain" were days ago in Buenos Aires at the International Symposium of Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuropsychiatry, organized by the Cognitive Neuroscience Institute (INEC).

"The social cognition attempts to understand and explain how the thoughts, feelings and behavior of individuals are influenced by real or imagined presence of others " " says Facundo Manes, director of INEC and the Neuroscience Center of the Favaloro Foundation. The work in this field are diverse and include different paradigms, such as facial expression recognition and emotion processing. The theory of mind is the human capacity to realize that other people have desires and beliefs different from ours and that their behavior can be explained in terms of them. This ability to recognize the nature of our beliefs and that of others is vital for life in society and for the transmission of culture.

Manes explains, the neural substrates underlying these processes are poorly understood, but research is beginning to discover. None is based on a single structure, but in several areas of the brain that act alternately integrated. Something that happens in the creation of moral conduct. "No regions of the mind dedicated to the moral" "says Jorge Moll, the Centre for Neuroscience LABS-D'Or, Rio de Janeiro. For any cognitive process requires the orchestration of different kinds of knowledge working together. What emerges the moral brain the interaction between cultural and biological factors? Although still in its infancy in this issue, cognitive neuroscience has some answers.

For example, studies show that patients who exhibit damage focused on one area of \u200b\u200bthe prefrontal cortex have deficits in behavior of pride, shame and repentance, and others who are associated with difficulties in attributing intentionality.

"We showed in healthy individuals altruistic decisions, such as donating money to charity, we activated the same brain circuits that make money," says Moll. What's more, we find that there is a specific region donations brain, suggesting that donating money, but not win it for ourselves, is connected with the responses of social cohesion. "

The first step to moral behavior is empathy. " The spark of consideration for others " defines Jean Decety, editor in chief of the Journal of Social Neuroscience and director of the Social Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory at the University of Chicago. He adds: " Why is it so important? Because it is considered the glue of social cohesion, and there is an association between empathy and morality. The experience of empathy llea us to behave moral. But while people often think that having a lot of empathy is a good thing, I say that has to be regulated because it can exhaust our emotional resources. "

Empathy is the natural ability to share and appreciate the feelings of others. It a necessary but not sufficient for compassion. "The first focuses on the individual himself, the second is centered on the other" , Decety said. Under this definition, empathy is neutral is good, but can also lead to cruelty.

both morale and empathy are the result of evolution, we share with most mammals and appear very early in life. At 18 hours after birth, when a baby cries in the nursery, the rest are set to mourn. Emotional resonance that is innate and opens the way to empathy and morality.

To remove components, Decety the study from the pain network. "Why cry? , he asks. Why do we have to express pain? Pain is a homeostatic mechanism to keep the body healthy. But through natural selection, the system pain supports and encourages the ability of social cohesion. If you love someone, you feel bad when that person has. " Decety discovered

that empathy does not always move us to action but to see people in a situation that causes pain, activates brain circuits linked to the danger, and the first reaction is avoidance. To work with it daily, as happens to the doctors, it is necessary to regulate empathy, and the researcher was able to prove that they are sufficient stimuli of 2.2 seconds to activate a region of the prefrontal cortex which governs emotion in the insula and amygdala.

Due to the plasticity of our brains, our sense of empathy and morals can be modified compared to earlier experiences, culture and education. "circuits are innate, but also respond to personal experience " says Josef Parvizi, Stanford University.

" social abuse and neglect can alter a child's brain connections Moll says. Where a guy who was well maintained could show generosity, other circuits can be driven by survival, the domain. If one abandons the child in an environment of violence, what do you get after 15 years? A brain wired for violence. This increases the responsibility of society. "

" For the evolution we have systems in the brain from birth seeking social interaction, "concludes Decety. We try to understand why we care about others, why empathy sometimes does not work or there are problems between groups. We are all the same species and there is no way we can survive without the other. "

Antoine Bechara and Antonio Damasio found that patients with damage to their prefrontal cortex can detect the implications of a social situation, but no decisions appropriate. "We showed that normal individuals develop responses galvanic skin, as they contemplate a risky decision, and begin to choose advantageously before they know the best strategy, but patients with damage to the prefrontal cortex behave as if they were insensitive to future consequences, are driven by immediate reward Bechara said. This mechanism could be linked to addictions. "

What do you think about this research? Makes your comments.

Fake Maria Conchita Alonso

Tribute to Master: An Interview with Levi-Strauss

by Octavio Martí


Published by Clarin, May 22, 2005


Claude Lévi-Strauss (Brussels, 1908-2009) is not only a leading figure in the world of ethnology during the second half of the twentieth century but an extraordinary writer and a philosopher of the first magnitude, the father of the structuralist school. This interview was conducted when he was 97 years. Privilege of age, can say and do respect their anguish at human levels. It lends itself readily to the interview, an exercise that shows bright and precise, just a little impatient with the need to clarify for the umpteenth time what, if attentive readers of his work, and we should have understood it long.

When you studied, Eurocentrism permeated all languages. Today, multiculturalism and the constant praise of cultural fusion are dominant. What impression this evolution will produce someone who was interested in testing the unity of humankind from the analysis of societies like the Bororo or the caduceus?

What we call European thought, our civilization, is the result of contributions coming from other latitudes, which are the result of contact between different peoples and cultures of the continent but also of our trips. Europe has always been a mestizo continent, to use the same term. The big difference we've seen in the twentieth century is the acceleration of communication. Travel more quickly, which previously required weeks or months of boat now travels in a few hours, but it is also true that before you came out of a commercial port of an old city very active to get to another of a world under construction, but now take off and land at an airport in another almost identical. Miscegenation, the merger needs time to mature, but the extraordinary acceleration of the twentieth century leaves no time to assimilate the influences of the other.


"The famous mestizaje is always at the expense of the weaker or, to put it another way, is an ideology that masks another form of colonialism?

you who say it, but I will not deny it. Your question puts his finger on a contradiction fundamental. Not everything that is part of the long inventory of the "heritage of mankind" is by pure reason. Concern about the revenue from the tourist flow plays a major role in the behavior of states.

The prospect of giving courses in philosophy, every year the same program 70 years ago led him to go to São Paulo to teach a few subjects that had no experience as sociology and ethnology. What lessons did it matter?

I went there after a suggestion by Paul Nizan. Ethnology had not yet own and fished fishing grounds in waters considered closely related, as was the philosophy. In sociology had read the work of the school of urban sociology in Chicago that had the basic idea to treat the city as a complex object whose growth was responding to recognizable laws, what I call unchanged. São Paulo was said then that it was a dangerous city because they could give quotes in a corner did not exist when you arrive, but that was already built when he went the person you had quoted. Was the possibility of seeing a city grow before my eyes, go within a few years, months and weeks in Europe this process had taken years. In 1935 there were an English company was laying a railway line new in the State of Paraná and created a new town every 25 or 30 miles. The first was then about 2,000 people and recently invited me to their fiftieth anniversary and has a million. The second town was a few hundred inhabitants, the third three dozen and then was the last of the track, one inhabitant, a Frenchman who was looking for adventure. I made an outline of how it was foreseeable that they would grow.

And what about those students?

I proposed to do papers on the street on your neighborhood, to examine all these changes ...

His first trip to the inside, their encounter with the Bororo, is the result of an expedition in vacation time.

Yes For an anthropologist with better training than I was encountering encountering Bororos paradise. It was a society whose material culture was intact, where there was still a special pen art, as can be seen in the current exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris, a company with a rich and complex social organization, or different from that found in the Nambikwara.

At what point are you in position to draw conclusions from these expeditions?

What really was or could be ethnology I learned later, in the early forties, the New York Public Library, having escaped from the France of Petain. There reading, I completed my training as an ethnologist. In between he had met Marcel Mauss and told him about the organization among the Bororo outbreeding. You know, Mauss, after a quick estimate, had told another investigator who had returned from spending 18 months in Africa, to this time field experience, he had enough material for 30 years of research. Without the war and German occupation had been my destiny another. In fact, after the armistice, I wanted to go back to Brazil but did not give me visa.

You've joked saying that he had discovered structuralism before reading ...

is my mother who had realized I was going to boulanger (baker) and boucher (butcher) that the first letters should mean bou since they were the same for the two words. More seriously, the secret of structuralism I have guessed while he was in the front, the Maginot Line, as liaison officer who hoped to serve as interpreter for the British troops. There, while waiting for a battle that did not start, I could see in detail how, behind the apparent randomness of the undulating beauty de un campo lleno de flores, estaba una organización estricta de cada una de ellas. Luego, en Nueva York, el encuentro con Roman Jakobson fue definitivo. El encuentro con Jakobson me reveló que era estructuralista sin saberlo. Lo que hasta entonces era una intuición confusa y desorganizada, coaguló, se transformó en doctrina. Cuando se estudia una sociedad se comienza por inventariar las diferencias porque los puntos comunes, al menos en un primer momento, pueden ser superficiales, quedarse en la epidermis del fenómeno. Luego, a un nivel más profundo, aparecen lo que yo llamo invariables...

... el tabú del incesto...

Sí, but the interesting thing is that this obligation outbreeding, looking for a partner outside the narrow family circle can have many different ways. In ancient Egypt was accepted marriage between cousins \u200b\u200bin other civilizations, in case of death of the wife is forced to marry his sister, in others the rule establishes other degrees of relationship. The invariable rule is in the continuing obligation of having to find a partner in another family and thus constitute society. If cultures differ is because, within the rule, there can be many variables. In nature there are laws that can be universal and constant, and if we find in culture rules that may have the same universal laws, then we can better understand the passage from nature to culture. That is the interest of the prohibition of incest.

ever blamed the May 1968 revolt in the loss of academic prestige of structuralism.


Al structuralism reproached be anti-humanist and that's partially true. We were attacked from two angles, one epistemological and one moral. Under the first, we criticized the failure to take the standpoint of the philosopher who gets rid of introspection about the own person, ie not to adopt the point of view of the subject, but that option seems to me legitimate because it has the right to choose the distance is best for each problem or research. At first glance, for example, a drop of water is just that, but the microscope can discover the organisms that inhabit it. We have chosen a magnification level that erases the notion of subject, which dissolves it, and study the mechanisms that work inside the mind. Regarding the accusation or criticism from a moral perspective it is impossible for an anthropologist not to consider the systematic destruction and monstrous that Western cultures have made different from ours since at least 1492. It is not possible to separate or isolate the condemnation of the destruction of human society from destruction of the victims today are plant and animal species, and all in the name of a humanism that has placed the man as king and lord of the world. The definition makes classical humanism of man is very close, is presented as a thinking, rather than treating it as a living, the result is that the frontier where mankind is just too close to the man himself, that this has been object thousand attacks by their peers.

On several occasions it has been held more and more akin to skepticism.

The skepticism comes with age. The spectacle of contemporary science calls it. During the twentieth century that science has progressed much more than in all previous centuries, a huge acceleration in the production of knowledge and at the same time, that rapid progress gives us more and more unfathomable depths, every discovery presents us with 10 puzzles, so that human effort is doomed to failure. But it is rightly so.

You can access the video from another interview, conducted in 1972: go to "video philosophy - modern thought."

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