Anne of Carversville

Riding the top of today’s NYTimes most emailed health articles is In Month of Giving, a Healthy Reward. Cami Walker, inflicted with multiple schlerosis, shares her story of using altruism to deal with her disease in a new book “29 Gifts: How a Month of Giving Can Change Your Life”.

For starters, altruism didn’t cure Walker’s multiple schlerosis. But moving away from a self-pitying concern for herself into connecting any doing for others confirmed in her own life what a vast array of scientific studies have documented.

Examples in the NYTimes read:

- A 2002 Boston College study found that patients with chronic pain experienced less when they counseled other pain patients.

- Researchers at the Buck Institute for Age Research found that elderly people who volunteered four hours a week or more were 44 percent likely to die during the study period.

- Conversely, being self-centered often results in higher cortisol levels, the stress hormones. A study of 150 heart patients found that the more self-references in a person’s behavior, the more severe the heart disease and worse performance on treadmill tests.

- A 1988 Study of “helper’s high” confirmed that altruistic people describe a sense of wellbeing that’s similar to that reported by regular exercisers and people who meditate. See Psychology Today’s The Joy of Giving.

Note that giving cannot be done with a sense of obligation or resentment. Those psychological attitudes actually raise stress hormones and cortisol levels. Simply stated, the primary way of relieving negative wellbeing is pushing it aside with positive emotional actions and thoughts.

Exploring Human Nature

In a related NYTimes story online today Some Biologists Find an Urge in Human Nature to Help, researchers continue their probe of human nature and behavioral characteristics that distinguish us from animals. In fact, some of us wonder if select species like dolphins and elephants aren’t kinder and more nurturing than humans.

“Why We Cooperate” is a new book by Michael Tomasello, director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Tomasello studies the cooperative behavior of preverbal children, generally 12 months to 24 months in age, and compares their behavior to that of apes in similarly structured experiments.

When it comes to apes, Tomasello finds that children have a natural predilection to cooperate and help others, compared with apes. As they grow older, children exhibit a tendency to be more selective in their helpfulness. Starting around age 3, they will share more generously with a child who was previously nice to them. Another behavior that emerges at the same age is a sense of social norms. “Most social norms are about being nice to other people,” Dr. Tomasello said in an interview, “so children learn social norms because they want to be part of the group.” via NYTimes

Tomasello writes that children are altruistic by nature, but also are naturally selfish. Parents are challenged to cultivate the balance towards positive social behavior. This strategy of childrearing  presupposes that parents actually embrace their own set of altruistic values.

Photo via Zuma Press via WSJFor Dr. Tomasello, the concept of “shared intentionality” defines Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” in real-life terms, arguing that cooperation is necessary for survival of human groups. Darwin never wrote that humans can go it alone, with the top guy on the hierarchy carrying ‘mankind’ into the future.

This claim is backed up by the research of Frans de Wall who argues that our ability to identify with another’s distress — a catalyst for compassion and charity — has deep roots in the origin of our species.

Recent biomedical studies show that our brains are built to feel another’s pain. Fundamental to all this research is testing the assumptions that human behavior is inherently competitive and based on hierarchy, or whether this system of social behavior and organization is learned.

I haven’t read these books but none of the reviews and articles discuss the topic from a gender-perspective. For now, ‘human’ encompasses both genders, although we already know that relevant differences exist in male and female brain structures.

To the extent that the 21st century does become one in which women ultimately triumph over patriarchal domination (a BIG assumption), understanding the truth about innate, gender-based human behavior is a cornerstone of the research.

The greatest advancement comes from technology allowing scientists to see what’s really going on in the human brain and secondly, cross-disciplinary — rather than silo — discussions around learnings in anthropological and cognitive research on human behavior.

Dr. de Wall shares my own view here at Anne of Carversville, writing “I’d argue that biology constitutes our greatest hope. One can only shudder at the thought that the humaneness of our societies would depend on the whims of politics, culture or religion.”

Thinking people are stepping back from global political, cultural and religious ideologies on every continent including North America. We have declining confidence that man-made institutions are actually committed to human cooperation and the collective future of the human species. In fact, a fiery global blowout is the ultimate vision and ecstacy for many cultural and religious ideologies.

Hopefulness is now lodged in a desire to understand exactly what makes humans tick, and it’s Cultural Creatives who are determined to rise above nationality, race, country and religion, searching for a human glue that will hold us together as an evolutionary species.

For Cultural Creatives the answer lies in scientific reality about human nature, which many spiritual types believe is reconcilable with core spiritual principles. The synthesis of the science doesn’t posit religion and science against each other, but it does promise a new interpretation and model for understanding of human existence, behavior and spiritual.

Institutions in every country are opposed to the scientific validation of these emerging theories for obvious reasons. The Internet makes the dissemination of new thinking and scientific inquiry widespread, with new learnings shared almost weekly.

Books — and humans also — can no longer be burned when knowledge threatens status quo ideologies. This is not to suggest that many aren’t dying or in prison for their beliefs. Anne

More reading: Tracing the Origins of Human Empathy Wall Street Journal

Karen Armstrong’s Wish for Charter of Compassion Comes True