Goodness Does Good To You — It’s Scientifically Proved

An article in Washington Post says If It Feels To Be Good, It Might Be Only Natural. A few days ago I was accidentally watching one of those Balaji Productions serials where most of the characters are perpetually involved in conspiracies against each other. I wondered aloud, “Don’t these people fall sick for being so negative and self-centered all the time?”

Look around you. Selfish people, although they seem successful, are mostly unhappy. It has nothing to do with karma (it does though, but that’s a different topic). Negative, selfish thinking keeps them tense. They are always anticipating good for themselves and bad for the others and this keeps them on toes, psychologically, all the time.

If you are good, if you are selfless, all your worries are gone. Now, being good and selfless doesn’t mean you be stupid and everybody takes advantage of your goodness. A crass example: a lady in one of the Carry On movie series keeps letting the soldiers in a train have sex with her because she wants to be of service to them, and eventually becomes a laughing stock. I mean, you get my point.

The Washington Post article says:

…when the volunteers placed the interests of others before their own, the generosity activated a primitive part of the brain that usually lights up in response to food or sex. Altruism, the experiment suggested, was not a superior moral faculty that suppresses basic selfish urges but rather was basic to the brain, hard-wired and pleasurable.

Their 2006 finding that unselfishness can feel good lends scientific support to the admonitions of spiritual leaders such as Saint Francis of Assisi, who said, “For it is in giving that we receive.” But it is also a dramatic example of the way neuroscience has begun to elbow its way into discussions about morality and has opened up a new window on what it means to be good.

Even animals have some sense of good and bad:

One experiment found that if each time a rat is given food, its neighbor receives an electric shock, the first rat will eventually forgo eating.

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