The Future Science of Altruism

As scientific understanding of both altruism and the plasticity of the human brain -- and, in a sense, of human heredity -- becomes more sophisticated, might we actually engineer ourselves to become better people?

Jordan Grafman, chief of cognitive neuroscience at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, talked about the biology of altruism in an earlier post. Here he sketches out some possible futures....

We’re not there, for sure ... but as the technology improves, becomes more precise, anybody who is forward-looking will want to take information, and as we think about what we’re learning about, it’ll help determine how we teach people in the future and sculpt their brains over many thousands of years.

It's hard to tell where we’re going to go. We don’t know what the social situation is. Look at any child in any different culture, how a child learns information now. We can see that the brain is highly programmed, in a sense, to subserve the knowledge we're teaching.
Aspects of that vary across cultures. The information we gather from various sciences: can we take it out of individual child and development, and think about it in terms of evolution across the brain across generations?

It's like a meme ... not simply in the ether, though, but actually impacting our brain.

Our own brains become a little more adaptable and adaptive during life, or we couldn’t grow and change.... We know that, and it gives us an opportunity, when people have brain injuries, to help people recover better, to be able to deal with the world around them. It’s not usually as dramatic as emphasizing, for example, certain brain areas to the detriment of others, depending on the way we’re teaching new knowledge.... But you want to be able to say, with some certainty, that the way we gain knowledge, and what we do with that, will affect the evolution of our brain. And evolving doesn’t necessarily mean evolving in a good sense. If you're really a future thinker, you're worried about that.

Scientists, said Grafman, are understanding how our brains are shaped by culture and environment, and a mechanism of these changes may involve fluctuation in our genes themselves, which we're only beginning to understand. (For more on the inheritance of environmentally-modulated genetic changes, check out this article on epigenetics that I wrote a couple years ago.)

One of the ways we differentiate ourselves from other species is that we have a sense of future. We don’t have to have immediate gratification.... But how far can we go into the future? How much of our brain is aimed at doing that? [...]

Other great apes have a frontal lobe, fairly well developed, but not nearly as well developed as our own. If you believe in Darwin and evolution, you argue that the area grew, and the neural architecture had to change in some way to accommodate the abilities associated with that behavior. There’s no doubt that didn’t occur overnight; probably a slow change, and it was one of the last areas of the brain to develop as well. It’s very recent evolutionary development that humans took full advantage of. What in the future? What in the brains can change?

The issue becomes -- do we teach this? Train people to do this?
Children tend to be selfish, and have to be taught to share. One of the most primitive things you see is self-preservation. If we can make altruism seem like a more appropriate and rewarding activity than it is.... It’s a skill. You gotta get good at it. You teach some of these things, but don't feel it’s necessarily at the opposite end f what we call competitive. You can still be competitive, but have an altruistic streak. They can work together. We want more social bonding and less conflict.

*Image: illustration from Thomas More's *Utopia