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A team of researchers from Boston College and the University of Albany devoted their study to researching the reasons for human altruistic behavior. According to experts, when people meet people in distress, using neural pathways, people see the changing situation and see how they can help those in need before they can. to act.
This process of imagination before the act of help is known as episodic stimulation, which essentially describes the ability of individuals to reorganize memories of the past into the new, mind-stimulated present situation.
According to the experts, this process of neuroimaging has made it possible to identify multiple brain pathways that, in turn, also have a relationship between the imagination and the desire to help others. For the experiment, the researchers looked at two distinct regions of the brain. The right temporoparietal junction (RTPJ) and the medial temporal lobe subsystem (MTL) have different functions. RTPJ is said to represent information about the minds of others, so the region is known as "taking perspective"; On the other hand, MTL is crucial to support the stimulation of imagined scenes.
Given the results of the study, there was a direct relationship between the imagination of a scene and the desire to help people in distress. As stated by Liane Young, an badociate professor of psychology, while study participants were stimulated to help someone, the neural activity in MTL constituted an important impetus for the willingness to help the person in need. Young mentions that MTL is responsible for prosociality, which is an effect of episodic processes to help others.
"If we can imagine helping someone, we think we're more likely to do it," says Young. "Imagining the landscape surrounding the situation can also encourage people to take into account the point of view of those who need help, which in turn encourages pro-social action."
The experts also draw attention to another phenomenon, the inflation of the imagination, where the man is initiated by a signal similar to the vivacity of his imagination. With this signal, humans can badess the probability of an event.
In order to discover how humans tended to adopt altruistic behavior on the basis of imagined support scenes, the experts conducted research on the discovery of neural and cognitive mechanisms, which also shed light on the relationship between the episodic imagination and its effect will help those who need it.
In the first experiment, the experts studied brain regions, while in the second, scientists used a more practical evaluation; While people imagined helping the scenes, the experts used transcranial magnetic stimulation (SMT) to disrupt the action of RTPJ, a brain region crucial for representing the minds of others. Through this process of disruption, the researchers were able to conclude that the effect of the altruistic imagination remained intact, which also suggested that it was not entirely dependent on perspective.
"We initially expected that a higher neuronal activity in the medial temporal lobe subsystem would be badociated with a greater willingness to help," experts said. "Surprisingly, we found the opposite: the more a person had activity in his MTL subsystem while she imagined helping scenes, the less she was willing to help the person in need."
Scientists attributed this result to a weaker MTL activity, responsible for greater imaginative ease of episodes, which also resulted in a greater willingness to help others. In addition, the results indicated that when people could easily imagine helping episodes, they were more willing to help people in distress.
Futuristic research efforts will aim to link laboratory results to altruistic real-world behavior.
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