New Orleans Jazz Music

Amazing band!!:

Thought Exercise

I was listening to the NPR show called Radio Lab today (see below for the exact show), today's episode was about morality.  I'm sure all of you have heard about those evolutionary psychology studies on kinship where they ask the participant, through a series of different vignettes, how many non-relatives would they sacrifice in order to save one of their own relatives.  Generally, people are more willing to sacrifice more non-kin to save closer kin, but the farther you are, genetically, from that that kin the fewer people you are willing to sacrifice.  The radio show referenced that last episode of MASH.  I vaguely remember watching the show as a child when I would stay home sick from school and I get parts of it mixed up with F-Troop... Anyway, in the last episode of MASH a village is being attacked by the enemy (I'm not sure if it's the Vietnam War or Korean War) and a women, her baby, and the rest of the village are hiding from the enemy.  The baby is sick, runny nose, coughing, sneezing, the whole shebang.  Here is the woman's predicament: don't smother your baby and the baby eventually coughs or sneezes, thereby alerting the enemy to your location where they find you, your baby, and the whole village and kill all of you.  Or, smother your baby and save yourself and the rest of the village.  Researchers gave participants the same theoretical moral dilemma to ponder while they were in an fMRI.  They found that two parts of the brain are at odds with each other over this quandary, the empathetic part and the logical part.  Eventually, one part wins over the other and you either make an empathetic decision or a logical one.  Personally, I think the logical one is also the empathetic one.