Bartal had expected to see this activity among rescuer rats because of human empathy. Surprisingly, even those who didn't rescue their cage mates showed neural traces. She says that the rats actually understand that there is a rat in distress, that he's trapped, and that he is unhappy. They activate their empathy system regardless of whether they are helping or not.What if the same machinery is firing in all cases but the behavior of in-group and outside-group pairs is different? The difference seemed to lie elsewhere, including in the nucleus accumbens, which deals in carrot-and-stick-type neurotransmitters like dopamine, serotonin, and GABA. Bartal states that it is active when you eat delicious food, win money, or have sexual relations.She adds that the brain's reward center is often called this. However, today's understanding of it shows that it can be linked to the anticipation of reward and the motivation for its pursuit. Bartal says that the brain's primary function is to encourage you to seek out things that are good for survival and to avoid those that are harmful.She repeated the experiment, focusing on this area with fiber photometry. This allowed her team to monitor neural chatter in live rats. The genetic material was injected into the animals' accumbens, which made the neurons fluoresce when a synapse spiked. They then implanted fiber optic strands to watch the rats move around and observe those flashes of light. The nucleus accumbens activity was highest in rats that had freed their roommates. The activity signal peaked as the rats approached the door to open it with their snouts. Bartal was informed that the most important moment for free-roaming rats was when they released the restraint and not playing with each other.Bartal wiretapped the nucleus accumbens of the rats with a dye that tracks where electrical signals originate. Bartal wanted to determine where the motivation to help comes from. (If a hungry rats searches for pizza in the New York subway, their gustatory brain would call the accumbens. She was able to determine which brain regions were talking to each other by taking brain slices of the animals immediately after the rescue task.Bartal tracked the calls to the motivational hub during rodent rescue missions, and discovered a caller she recognized as the anterior cingulate cortex. This suggests that there is a communication line between reward and empathy, which could help to understand compassionate behavior. She admits that it is still too early to fully describe the microcircuitry involved. This is what we are currently working on.ContentIn an email to WIRED, Robert Sapolsky, a Stanford University neurobiologist, said that this is a great study. Sapolsky, who did not participate in the study, wrote Behave: Biology of Humans at Their Best and Worst. This book describes what motivates human behavior, including ubiquitous categorizations of them versus us.According to Sapolsky's findings, the team's results reveal a lot about us, as experts would predict identical results for human brains. Experts would expect identical results for humans: an us/them distinction and an anterior cingulate making demands and the accumbens motivating motivation. It would be impossible to conduct such thorough brain experiments in humans. However, the results of these experiments in rats offer a sweet message. Sapolsky says that empathy and helping others isn't a product of Sunday sermons. It is older than our humanness and primateness. Our tendency to them-ify others is also old.
