How your brain invents morality
How your brain invents morality
Neurophilosopher Patricia Churchland explains her theory of how we evolved a conscience.
By Sigal Samuel at Vox
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/7/8/20681558/conscience-patricia-churchland-neuroscience-morality-empathy-philosophy
"SNIP......
One insight came from a rather unexpected place. There are these little rodents called voles, and there are many species of them. With montane voles, the male and female meet, mate, then go their separate ways. But with prairie voles, they meet, mate, and then they’re bonded for life. Neuroscientists asked: What’s the difference in their brains?
There’s a special neurochemical called oxytocin. It gets taken up by neurons via special receptors. You can vary the effect of oxytocin by varying the density of receptors.
Scientists found that in the brain’s reward system, the density of receptors for oxytocin in the prairie voles was much higher than in montane voles. And that changed the portfolio of the animals’ behavior. It turns out oxytocin is a very important component of feeling bonded [which is a prerequisite for empathy].
Sigal Samuel
In your book, you write that our neurons even help determine our political attitudes — whether we’re liberal or conservative — which has implications for moral norms, right?
Patricia Churchland
Yes. There was this experiment that totally surprised me. Researchers rounded up a lot of subjects, put them in the brain scanner, and showed them various non-ideological pictures. If you showed subjects a picture of a human with a lot of worms squirming in his mouth, you could see differences in the activity levels of whole series of brain areas. There were much higher levels of activity if you identified as very conservative than if you identified as very liberal. Just that one picture of worms squirming in the mouth separated out the conservatives from the liberals with an accuracy of about 83 percent.
......SNIP"
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