Our moods may waver, but most of us are very confident and consistent in making moral judgements. That's why neuroscientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass. were surprised to find those judgments could be altered, easily and significantly, by placing a magnet near the temporal parietal junction of the brain."It's one thing to 'know' that we'll find morality in the brain," researcher Liane Young told the New York Daily News. "It's another to 'knock out' that brain area and change people's moral judgments."
The temporal parietal junction is active when people are asked to make moral judgments that require them to think about the intentions of others, something called "theory of mind." One example would be figuring out what a hunter was thinking if he shoots his friend while on a hunting trip: Was he secretly jealous, or did he mistake his friend for a duck?
The researchers, led by Rebecca Saxe, MIT assistant professor of brain and cognitive sciences, used a non-invasive method called transcranial magnetic stimulation to apply a magnetic field to a small area of the skull (on the scalp) to create weak electric currents that stop nearby brain cells from firing normally for a while. Their work appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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