A recent study suggests that coordinating activity between two brain areas can increase altruistic behaviour. Researchers from East China Normal University and the University of Zurich found that stimulating the frontal and parietal lobes together made people more likely to act unselfishly.

In the study, 44 people played a game where they had to decide how to share money with someone else. While they were making these decisions, a mild electrical stimulation was applied to their brains to make two areas work together in a specific rhythm called gamma waves.

The results showed that participants were slightly more likely to make altruistic choices, offering more money to others even when it meant earning less for themselves. A computational model suggested that the stimulation nudged people to weigh their partner’s outcomes more in their decisions.

The study provides evidence that altruistic behaviour may depend on coordinated brain activity. Researchers caution that they did not directly record neural activity during the trials, and future studies combining stimulation with EEG could confirm the effect more clearly.

These findings suggest that our willingness to help others may not only be shaped by upbringing and culture but also by the underlying neural networks in the brain, offering new insight into the science of cooperation and generosity.

Source: PLOS Biology