Well, whaddya know?

This is taken from the July 31, 2007 issue of The American Society of Radiologic Technologists newsletter. As everyone, especially thos who are having a hard time right now, can use a bit mor joy in their lives this is certainly food for thought.

Paying taxes and giving to charity appear to stimulate the brain’s pleasure center, according to a new functional magnetic resonance study.
A three-member research team, including a cognitive psychologist and two economists, used fMR to scan the brains of 19 women 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.
Participants were asked to lie on their backs in the fMR scanner for an hour-long session and view 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 decisions on additional giving.
The fMR results showed that when the subjects saw the charity get the money, there was activation in two brain regions: the caudate nucleus and the nucleus accumbens. 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 up when basic needs and pleasures are satisfied.
Researchers were surprised that the brain's reward center was stimulated even when the subjects did not have a free choice as to where their money was going.
"It reinforces the idea that there is true altruism, where it's all about how well the common good is doing," said Ulrich Mayr, Ph.D., from the University of Oregon in Eugene, Ore. "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 appears in the June 15 issue of Science.
The study gives economists a novel look inside the brain during taxation, according to William T. Harbaugh, Ph.D., from the University of Oregon.
"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 nonprofit charity to help other people."
"On top of that, people experience more brain activation when they give voluntarily, even though everything here is anonymous," added Dr. Harbaugh. "That's a very surprising result and, to me, an optimistic one."
Dr. Mayr suggested that neural activation on fMR could help predict which people would give the most money to charity.
“We could call the people whose brains light up more when money goes to charity than to themselves altruists,” he said. "The others are egoists."
The research team noted that the study participants saw their tax dollars going to a food bank. It remains to be seen if the brain responses would have been similar if their taxes had not gone to charitable causes.
By Laurie Volkin and Richard S. Dargan, ASRT Contributing Writers