Keeping Up with the Latest Brain Research

I found the cognews web site when following up a news item on brain research. What's an economics instructor doing reading about the brain, you ask?

As a teacher, I am interested in how the brain functions. If I know more about the brain, then I know more about how people learn. At least, that's my theory. The problem is that the journals that publish brain research are pretty darn inaccessible to anyone who's not an expert in the field. That includes economists. Thus, I need an interpretation of new thinking about the brain, rather than the original research. Cognews fills the bill.

For example, an article on altruism caught my eye. As a fan of Gary Becker and the whole Chicago school approach to economics, I've long recognized that altruism, doing something good for others with no apparent benefit for yourself, is quite rational. Now, if the latest research is valid, I see that altruism may be "hard wired" into the brain.

In the journal Science, German researchers report that infants as young as 18 months demonstrated behavior that suggests humans have an innate tendency to be helpful. In the experiments, toddlers aided strangers in completing tasks such as stacking books. "The results were astonishing because these children are so young - they still wear diapers and are barely able to use language, but they already show helping behavior," said Felix Warneken, a psychologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

As a social scientist I can speculate that altruism may be a way of increasing the odds of surviving in a hostile world. So, thousands of years ago, the brain some how became wired with the helper instinct. Could this instinct also be found in animals? The researchers also asked that same question:

"It's been claimed chimpanzees act mainly for their own ends; but in our experiment, there was no reward and they still helped."

How does any of this apply to teaching economics? I'm not 100% sure, but I think I see possibilities. Students helping students, faculty helping faculty, for example. With no reward for that helping behavior.

Perhaps older wisdom anticipated these research findings. "Virtue is its own reward," is a saying I often heard when growing up. It's nice to see that science has confirmed that principle.