I Didn't Sin-It Was My Brain - Discover Magazine

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I Didn't Sin—It Was My Brain

Brain researchers have found the sources of many of our darkest thoughts, from envy to wrath.
By Christopher Buzelli and Kat McGowan | October 4, 2009 7:00 PM
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Why does being bad feel so good? Pride, envy, greed, wrath, lust, gluttony, and sloth: It might
sound like just one more episode of The Real Housewives of New Jersey, but this enduring
formulation of the worst of human failures has inspired great art for thousands of years. In the 14th
century Dante depicted ghoulish evildoers suffering for eternity in his masterpiece, The Divine
Comedy. Medieval muralists put the fear of God into churchgoers with lurid scenarios of demons
and devils. More recently George Balanchine choreographed their dance.
Today these transgressions are inspiring great science, too. New research is explaining where these
behaviors come from and helping us understand why we continue to engage in them—and often
celebrate them—even as we declare them to be evil. Techniques such as functional magnetic
resonance imaging (fMRI), which highlights metabolically active areas of the brain, now allow
neuroscientists to probe the biology behind bad intentions.
The most enjoyable sins engage the brain’s reward circuitry, including evolutionarily ancient regions
such as the nucleus accumbens and hypothalamus; located deep in the brain, they provide us such
fundamental feelings as pain, pleasure, reward, and punishment. More disagreeable forms of sin
such as wrath and envy enlist the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC). This area, buried in the
front of the brain, is often called the brain’s “con ict detector,” coming online when you are
confronted with contradictory information, or even simply when you feel pain. The more social sins
(pride, envy, lust, wrath) recruit the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), brain terrain just behind the
forehead, which helps shape the awareness of self.
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No understanding of temptation is complete without considering restraint, and neuroscience has

begun to illuminate this process as well. As we struggle to resist, inhibitory cognitive control
3 networks
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Meanwhile, research suggests that regions such as the caudate—partly responsible for body
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movement and coordination—suppress the physical impulse. It seems to be the same whether you
feel a spark of lechery, a surge of jealousy, or the sudden desire to pop somebody in the mouth: The
two sides battle it out, the devilish reward system versus the angelic brain regions that hold us in
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check.
It might be too strong to claim that evolution has wired us for sin, but excessive indulgence in lust or
greed could certainly put you ahead of your competitors. “Many of these sins you could think of as
virtues taken to the extreme,” says Adam Safron, a research consultant at Northwestern University
whose neuroimaging studies focus on sexual behavior. “From the perspective of natural selection,
you want the organism to eat, to procreate, so you make them rewarding. But there’s a potential for
that process to go beyond the bounds.”
There is no sin center in the brain, no single node of endishness that we might be able to shut
down with drugs or electrodes. With the advent of modern imaging techniques that peer into the
brain as it functions, though, we at least gain some perspective on our bad habits. At the same time,
we can indulge in another gratifying pastime: As other people misbehave, we can sit back and
watch.
LUST In the annals of sin, weaknesses of the esh—lust, gluttony, sloth—are considered second-
tier offenses, less odious than the “spiritual” sins of envy and pride. That’s good news for us, since
these yearnings are notoriously dif cult to suppress.
When it comes to lust, neuroimaging con rms that the prurient urge is all-encompassing. Watching
pornography calls upon brain regions associated with reward, sensory interpretation, and visual
processing. It enlists the amygdala and the hypothalamus, which deal with emotional information; it
also stimulates the reward-processing ventral striatum, probably due to the satisfying nature of
watching erotic stimuli. All said, the most notable thing about lust is that it sets nearly the whole
brain buzzing, Safron says.
These responses are so unique and distinctive that, in the context of an experiment, it is possible to
determine whether a man is aroused just by looking at an fMRI brain scan. “These are huge effects,”
Safron says. “You’re looking at the difference between something that elicits intense desire and
something that does not.” (Women show a less spectacular response, Safron says, and it is unclear
exactly why.)
If lechery is all-consuming, how do we ever manage to control it? As with other powerful impulses,
we try to shut down arousal by calling upon the right superior frontal gyrus and right anterior
cingulate gyrus, according to research led by Mario Beauregard of the University of Montreal. He
and others propose that these brain areas form a conscious self-regulatory system. This network
provides us with the evolutionarily unprecedented ability to control our own neural processing—a
3 feat
FREEachieved by no other creature.
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GLUTTONY Today it is dif cult to regard overeating as a sin, considering the overwhelming
evidence that physiology plays a more powerful role than morals in appetite and indulgence. SUBSCRIBE
Physician Gene-Jack Wang of Brookhaven National Laboratory has studied the brains of overeaters
since 1999, when he and colleague Nora Volkow originally observed that obesity and drug
addiction alter the same brain circuits. These pathways, which rely on the neurotransmitter
dopamine, are often referred to simplistically as the “reward system” but are also involved in
motivation, attention, decision making, and other complex functions. In their studies, Wang and
Volkow found that both drug addicts and obese people are usually less sensitive to dopamine’s
rewarding effects. Being relatively numb to the pleasure and motivation signal may make them more
likely to chase after a stronger thrill: more food or a bump of cocaine. Excessive stimulation further
desensitizes dopaminergic neurons, and the compulsion snowballs.
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THE SCIENCES | MIND | TECHNOLOGY | HEALTH | ENVIRONMENT | PLANET EARTH

I Didn't Sin—It Was My Brain

By Christopher Buzelli and Kat McGowan | October 4, 2009 7:00 PM

3 FREE WANT IT ALL? GET ALREADY A

Shop Nootropics Depot®

Dynamine Methylliberine… PRL-8-53 Powder | Half…

No understanding of temptation is complete without considering restraint, and neuroscience has

memory & learning

Beautiful, Well Made Items

MORE FROM DISCOVER

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Can You Learn How to Have a Lucid Dream?

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Why Do We Dream? Science O ers a Few Possibilities

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Why Do We Feel Nostalgia?

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Decoding Cuneiform, One of the Earliest Forms of Writing

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