Highlighted
sections are areas of the brain that were more active when participants
read stories
dealing with their protected values. Courtesy of Sarah Gimbel/USC
(January 9, 2016) Brain
scans show that stories that force us to think about our deepest values
activate a region of the brain once thought to be its autopilot.
Everyone has at least a few non-negotiable values. These are
the things that, no matter what the circumstance, you’d never compromise for
any reason – such as “I’d never hurt a child,” or “I’m against the death
penalty.”
Real-time brain scans show that when people read stories
that deal with these core, protected values, the “default mode network” in
their brains activates.
This network was once thought of as just the brain’s
autopilot, since it has been shown to be active when you’re not engaged by
anything in the outside world – but studies like this one suggest that it’s
actually working to find meaning in the narratives.
“The brain is devoting a huge amount of energy to whatever
that network is doing. We need to understand why,” said Jonas Kaplan of the USC
Dornsife Brain and Creativity Institute. Kaplan was the lead author of the
study, which was published on Jan. 7 in the journal Cerebral Cortex.
Kaplan thinks that it’s not just that the brain is presented
with a moral quandary, but rather that the quandary is presented in a narrative
format.
To find relevant stories, the researchers sorted through 20
million blog posts using software developed at the USC Institute for Creative
Technologies.