Yes, you secretly like giving your money to the government. University of Oregon scientists have found that doing things like donating money to charity or even paying your taxes can give you the same sort of satisfaction you derive from feeding your own hunger pangs.

A cognitive psychologist and two economists gave 19 female participants $100 and then scanned their brains with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) as they watched their money go to the food bank through mandatory taxation, and as they made choices about whether to give more money voluntarily or keep it for themselves.

The participants lay on their backs in the fMRI scanner for an hour-long session and viewed the financial transfers on a computer screen. The scanner used a super-cooled magnet, carefully tuned radio waves and powerful computers to calculate what parts of the brain were active as subjects saw their money go to the food bank and made yes or no decisions on additional giving.

Researchers found that two evolutionarily ancient regions deep in the brain – the caudate nucleus and the nucleus accumbens – fired when subjects saw the charity get the money. The activation was even larger when people gave the money voluntarily, instead of just paying it as taxes. These brain regions are the same ones that fire when basic needs such as food and pleasures (sweets or social contact) are satisfied.

“The surprising element for us was that in a situation in which your money is simply given to others – where you do not have a free choice – you still get reward-center activity,” said Ulrich Mayr, a professor of psychology. “I don’t think that most economists would have suspected that. It reinforces the idea that there is true altruism – where it’s all about how well the common good is doing. I’ve heard people claim that they don’t mind paying taxes, if it’s for a good cause – and here we showed that you can actually see this going on inside the brain, and even measure it.

The study gives economists a novel look inside the brain during taxation, said co-author William T. Harbaugh, a UO professor of economics and member of the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Mass. “To economists, the surprising thing about this paper is that we actually see people getting rewards as they give up money,” he said. “Neural firing in this fundamental, primitive part of the brain is larger when your money goes to a non-profit charity to help other people.”

“On top of that,” Harbaugh added, “people experience more brain activation when they give voluntarily – even though everything here is anonymous. That’s a very surprising result – and, to me, an optimistic one.”

However, this latter finding, which offers confirmation to the economic theory of “warm-glow” giving, doesn’t necessarily mean that taxes should be lowered and charity relied on more heavily, Harbaugh said. In a voluntary environment, he added, lots of people free-ride and donations fall.

The study, Mayr said, reflects the balancing act that every society must face. “What this shows to someone who designs tax policy is that taxes aren’t all bad,” he said. “Paying taxes can make citizens happy. People are, to varying degrees, pure altruists. On top of that they like that warm glow they get from charitable giving. Until now we couldn’t trace that in the brain.”

Neural activation from mandatory taxation, the researchers said, helps predict who will give. “We could call the people whose brains light up more when money goes to charity than to themselves altruists,” Mayr said. “The others are egoists. Based on what we saw in the experiments, we can use this classification to predict how much people are willing to give when the choice is theirs.”

There remain a lot of unanswered questions, Harbaugh said. “We show that people liked paying a tax that went to a food bank. But suppose the tax had been unfair. What then? Or suppose that people voted to make other people pay the tax, too? That would help other people even more, so would the voter get a bigger neural reward?”

Harbaugh, Mayr and co-author Dan Burghart, an economics graduate student, say they are not worried about the possibility that governments could use their method to monitor tax evasion, or charities could use it to figure out whom to ask for money. “To do this, we needed a $3 million scanner, some liquid helium and a few weeks of computer time,” Harbaugh said.

“If a participant moved her head,” Burghart added, “we had to start all over. It will be a while before this is built into cell phones.”

Source: University of Oregon

Drinking heavy amounts of alcohol over a long period of time may decrease brain volume, according to a new study.The study involved MRI scans of 1,839 people from the Framingham Offspring study, ages 34 to 88, who were classified as non-drinkers, former drinkers, low drinkers (one to seven drinks per week), moderate drinkers (eight to 14 drinks per week), or high drinkers (more than 14 drinks per week). MRI scans were performed and used to measure brain volume, which can be thought of as a measure of brain aging.

The study found the more alcohol people drink on a regular basis, the lower their brain volume.

“Research has shown that there is a beneficial effect of alcohol in reducing incidence of cardiovascular disease in people who consume low to moderate amounts of alcohol. However, this study found that greater alcohol consumption was negatively correlated with brain volume,” said study author Carol Ann Paul, MS, of Wellesley College in Wellesley, MA.

This cross-sectional study found people who had more than 14 drinks per week had an average 1.6 percent reduction in the ratio of brain volume to skull size compared to people who didn’t drink. In other words, brain volume decreased .25 percent on average for every increase in drinking category (i.e. non-drinkers, former drinkers, low drinkers, moderate drinkers, or high drinkers).

In addition, Paul reported the inverse relationship between drinking and brain volume was slightly larger in women than in men. Also, drinking heavy amounts of alcohol seemed to have the biggest negative impact on brain volume for women in their 70s.

In looking at the longitudinal effects of drinking, people who had a 12-year history of heavy drinking had less brain volume than those who changed into the high drinking group during those 12 years. Researchers are following up on these findings to make sure these differences hold up.

Sleep not only protects memories from outside interferences, but also helps strengthen them, according to research that will be presented at the American Academy of Neurology’s 59th Annual Meeting in Boston, April 28 – May 5, 2007.

The study looked at memory recall with and without interference (competing information). Forty-eight people between the ages of 18 and 30 took part in the study. All had normal, healthy sleep routines and were not taking any medications. Participants were divided evenly into four groups—a wake group without interference, a wake group with interference, a sleep group without interference and a sleep group with interference. All groups were taught the same 20 pairs of words in the initial training session.

The wake groups were taught the word pairings at 9 a.m. and then tested on them at 9 p.m. after 12 hours awake. The sleep groups were taught the word pairs at 9 p.m. and tested on them at 9 a.m. after a night of sleep. Just prior to testing, the interference groups were given a second list of word pairs to remember. The first word in each pair was the same on both lists, but the second word was different, testing the brain’s ability to handle competing information, known as interference. The interference groups were then tested on both lists. The study found that people who slept after learning the information performed best, successfully recalling more words. Those in the sleep group without interference were able to recall 12 percent more word pairings from the first list than the wake group without interference. With interference, the recall rate was 44 percent higher for the sleep group.

“This is the first study to show that sleep protects memories from interference,” said study author Jeffrey Ellenbogen, MD, with Harvard Medical School in Boston, MA, and Fellow of the American Academy of Neurology. “These results provide important insights into how the sleeping brain interacts with memories: it appears to strengthen them. Perhaps, then, sleep disorders might worsen memory problems seen in dementia.”

The University of Pennsylvania Nassau Undergraduate Research Fund and the National Institutes of Health supported the study.

Source: American Academy of Neurology