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Performing Acts of Kindness Pleases the Brain

It seems that the saying, “It’s better to give than to receive,” is not just old adage, giving to others actually affects the brain in a significant way. While most of the time, we think of experiencing happiness coming from receiving money, fancy things or physical pleasures, science now has found that there’s real, solid biochemical basis behind the old cliché. (In fact, the sight of affluent people who are still dissatisfied, unfulfilled and angry is a cliché in itself.)

It turns out that our brains are even programmed to engage in giving according to Darwin, who observed and theorized that as part of the group selection rule in human evolution, whatever helps to do good for the group eventually is linked (programmed into the species) to enjoyment and contentment.

So how does this biochemical process happen? The mesolimbic system in our brain (that links the ventral tegmentum in the midbrain to the nucleus accumbens –the nucleus accumbens is central to the brain reward system) is programmed to respond to positive stimuli (money, sex, etc.).

The mesolimbic pathway is a neural pathway, one of the four major pathways where the neurotransmitter dopamine is found. Dopamine is a hormone and neurotransmitter. Dopamine neurons encode the following of rewarding outcomes – the brain reward system (meaning, we repeat behaviors that lead to maximize rewards).

In addition, giving through donation also has been found to stimulate another brain area – the subgenual area, which produces a major pleasurable neurotransmitter called oxytocin. In documented animal studies, oxytocin has been observed to promote social attachment to others and to protect against stress.

There Are a Number of Medical Studies That Support This Information

In the online journal from the Public Library of Science, Oxytocin Increases Generosity in Humans found that subjects given doses of oxytocin offered 80% more generosity to strangers than the placebo group, confirming earlier studies which show that oxytocin affects trust and generosity.

At the University of Massachusetts Medical School, they studied 2,000 mostly healthy Presbyterian churchgoers finding that those members who helped others were better off and less depressed than those who did not.

In addition, Carolyn Schwartz, a research professor at University of Massachusetts Medical School, found that people providing support the victims of multiple sclerosis benefited significantly (even more than the patients) from their humanistic efforts.

In a decade-long study of San Francisco Bay Area residents beginning in the 1930s, researchers found that those who volunteered in assisting others and other activities of contributing when they were adolescents were less prone to depression in their youth and when the grew older.

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