Joy, Guilt, Anger, Love Read Online Free Page B

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    In light of their results, Joshua Greene and others have argued that there is an evolutionary reason why we would hasten to save the child in the stream and put away the donation letter instead. In evolutionary terms, receiving a letter, or an email for that matter, asking one to donate money for a child far away is a modern scenario, facilitated by today’s large global networks of communication. Our biological ancestors were more likely to have found themselves in the situation of having to rescue someone who was in danger by putting themselves at risk. Our brains, and in particular the circuits of our brains that mediate emotion, have been trained for thousands of years to respond to moral situations of that kind. By contrast, our reactions to the more distant cry of children in remote places haven’t had the reinforcement of years of evolution. 15 The decision to act towards saving their lives involves more sophisticated reasoning.
    The deep seat of guilt
    Guilt is central to dilemmas such as the one described above. Not helping the child would be an incredibly heavy burden to carry, whereas not donating the money allows us to comfortably go on with our lives and spend money on luxuries and surplus commodities we don’t need, with a lesser sense of guilt.
    As I said earlier, guilt is essentially about choices that can directly or indirectly have an impact on others, or violate norms that are agreed upon in a given society, either explicitly, such as in criminal codes, or implicitly, as in customs or conventions.
    For a long time, guilt was a scientific subject for psychology, not neuroscience. It was about testing decision-making, attitudes and behaviour in given moral choice scenarios, in individual settings or in simulated social groups. Scientists are now trying to integrate those tests with contemporary brain science. These days, that normally involves using brain-imaging technologies, in particular functional magnetic resonance, or fMRI. A means by which measurements of blood flow in the brain can be captured and translated into images, fMRI has evolved as a key research method to visualize the brain’s operations as they take place in real time. This is indeed a daunting task.
    Metaphors of guilt’s overpowering and long-lasting nature would easily lead us to construe images of guilt occupying a deep seat in our brain, engraved in hidden neural grooves, and constantly pounding, like the pang of an irrepressible bad memory. But if we feel guilty about something, does that mean that some part of our brain will be continuously sparking guilt? After all, despite guilt’s incessant effect, we feel it more keenly when we are reminded of our bad deeds.
    Studies investigating the neural seat of guilt have consisted in monitoring what happens in the brains of participants in a variety of moral scenarios. In some cases, they were asked to judge hypothetical scripts of social and moral actions, similar to the dilemma discussed above, or to choose whether or not to cause harm to someone. In other experiments participants were exposed to emotionally charged scenes representing social violations, such as physical assaults, while in yet others they simply read or listened to guilt-laden sentences. 16
    Ullrich Wagner and colleagues at the Charité Institute in Berlin, Germany, conducted a different kind of study. The singularity of their experiment was the exploration of the neural seat of a personal, self-conscious sense of guilt, the one that germinates in the remembrance of guilt-associated events, like Beckett’s pungent memory of the accidental killing of the hedgehog. 17 Another particular element in this study is that it aimed at mapping the brain’s specific nook for guilt, by comparing what happened in the brain during the recollection of guilt with what happened in the brain during the recollection of shame, guilt’s false friend, and sadness, a less related emotion. To do that, they asked over a dozen