DAMAGE to an area of the brain behind the forehead, centimetres behind the eyes, transforms the way people make moral judgements in life-or-death situations, scientists are reporting.Asked to resolve hypothetical dilemmas ? such as tossing a person from a bridge into the path of a runaway train carriage to save five others ? people with damage to their ventromedial prefrontal cortex tended to sacrifice one life to save many, according to a study published by the journal Nature.People with intact brains were far less likely to kill or harm someone when confronted with the same scenarios.The study suggests that an aversion to hurting others is hard-wired into the brain.”Part of our moral behaviour is grounded ? in a specific part of our brains,” said Antonio Damasio, one of the study’s lead authors and director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California.The findings could not be used to predict behaviour, Dr Damasio said, because the scenarios presented in the study were unrealistic. More research was needed to determine if people with and without brain damage would react differently when faced with real-world moral dilemmas, he said.A finding linking a specific type of brain damage to day-to-day moral behaviour could have legal implications in criminal cases. Researchers said the study was only meant to explore the psychological underpinnings of moral actions, not to characterise decisions as right or wrong.
KA:
Which Asians might those be?
Apple:
Chinese, probably Japanese. TCM (traditional Chinese medicine), taoists, buddhists, etc. Yogis (no, not the Hanna Barbera creation) – Lao Tzu.
Hate to break it to you, KA, but Aristotle also believed that the mind and body are one. Or rather that “the soul is not separable from the body, and the same holds good of particular parts of the soul.” He also believed that knowledge is not preexisting, but that instead it grows from experiences stored in our memories.
evil:
No, I hate to break it to you, but Aristotle speaks of mind & soul as 2 separate items interacting.
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/jod/texts/aristotle.soul.html
“That soul is a harmony in the sense of the mode of composition of the parts of the body is a view easily refutable; for there are many composite parts and those variously compounded; of what bodily part is mind or the sensitive or the appetitive faculty the mode of composition? And what is the mode of composition which constitutes each of them? It is equally absurd to identify the soul with the ratio of the mixture; for the mixture which makes flesh has a different ratio between the elements from that which makes bone. The consequence of this view will therefore be that distributed throughout the whole body there will be many souls, since every one of the bodily parts is a different mixture of the elements, and the ratio of mixture is in each case a harmony, i.e. a soul”
AND:
“The case of mind is different; it seems to be an independent substance implanted within the soul and to be incapable of being destroyed.“
KA,
I admit that I’m not into philosophy, though my psychology text book opens up hailing Aristotle for viewing the mind and body as one. So there’s my source. If it’s wrong, then I don’t know since I really don’t do philosophy.