According to the latest study, injury to a part of the brain believed to produce emotional behavior may alter a person’s moral judgment.
The New York Times announced that the study was published in the March 22 issue of the journal Nature. The research discovered that damage to this section of the brain, known as the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, could in fact alter a person’s eagerness to hurt or even kill another individual.
The research has been conducted by investigators from the University of Iowa. The newspapers report that it was a small one, and the results are hypothetical: No one in the research actually changed his or her behavior due to of the brain injury.
Nevertheless, the scientists discovered that people could radically alter their behavior and rationalize it when that section of the brain is "offline." For instance, patients with the brain damage were twice as probable as a control group to justify murdering a crying newborn if they were convinced the noise would reveal people who were hiding from enemy soldiers.
"The difference was obvious, for all of the ventromedial patients," the Times quotes the leader the research, Dr Michael Koenigs as saying.
