Couldn't find what you looking for?

TRY OUR SEARCH!

Most of us know someone, or maybe we are someone, who "gives 'til it hurts." Sometimes, however, pathological generosity results from brain damage.

In 2013, wire services all over the world carried an interesting story —  a Brazilian man identified only as Mr. A, developed, after he suffered a hemorrhagic stroke, damage to part of his brain following a rupture to a blood vessel that led to some rather mysterious symptoms.

Losing a Job and Giving One's Possessions Away

According to news accounts, the 49-year-old Brazilian suffered damage to a "subcortical" part of his brain that controls executive function, the higher-level thinking we all do when we make various life decisions that range from time management to choosing what to have for dinner. Mr. A's brain functions seemed largely to have returned to their previous levels as he recovered from his stroke, except for one shocking new symptom — excessive generosity.

It might not sound like much of a problem at first glance, but the symptom cost him his job. Mr. A, his doctors told the press, made indiscriminate gifts of food, drink, and money after he left the hospital. Because of his compulsive generosity, he was let go from his managerial job with a major corporation.

Mr. A said he didn't care. "Life is too short," he told his doctors, to worry about material things.

Some doctors have commented that personality changes after stroke are common, although excessive generosity "appears to be unique." However, the phenomenon is not entirely unknown in brain science.

Excessive Generosity May Be a Problem with Impulse Control

In February 2013, scientists doing research at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands reported findings of their studies of excessive generosity in rodents. The Dutch research team looked at the role of a part of the brain known as the amygdala in economic decisions. The amygdala as a whole, on the basis of studies with laboratory rodents, is well known as the part of the brain that exerts impulse control and plays a large role in emotion processing in general. In people, however, portions of the amygdala seem also to regulate trust.

When a person with a normally functioning amygdala meets a potential recipient of a gift or a potential partner in a business transaction as trustworthy, then giving that person something of value may be considered economically rational.

Trustworthy people are likely to reciprocate when the tables are turned.

When a person who does not have a normally functioning amygdala meets a potential recipient of a gift or a potential partner in a business transaction, there may not be any thought given to whether the recipient or partner is trustworthy. This person may be disinclined to care whether the recipient of possessions will ever give them back, or whether the recipient is "worthy" of the gift.

People who have a normally functioning amygdala will "back off" from further interaction when their goodwill is not reciprocated, but people who have damage to this part of the brain will give even more. With that additional information, it's easy to begin to see how excessive generosity can be debilitating!

Inappropriate Generosity May Be Due to Damage to a Very Specific Part of the Brain

To test their hypothesis that excessive or inappropriate generosity may be due to damage to a very specific part of the brain, the University of Utrecht researchers recruited three volunteers who had tiny points of damage on both sides of a part of the amygdala known as the basolateral amygdala (BLA) without any damage to another part of the amygdala known as the central-medial amygdala (CMA). They also recruited nine volunteers who had no brain damage. Then they asked the volunteers who had BLA damage to play a "one-shot trust games" with the volunteers who did not have brain damage.

In the trust game, one player is an investor and one player is a trustee. Both players receive the same amount of money. The investors can then send any amount of money they want to their trustees, and that amount of money is multiplied by three. Then the trustee can send any part of the money received, or no money at all, back to the investor. The volunteers were given real money for the game.

The researchers found that when volunteers who had brain damage played the role of investor, on average they sent about twice as much money as the volunteers who did not have brain damage.

When volunteers who had brain damage played the role of trustee, even though they did not have to return any money at all, they typically returned about twice as much money as players who did not have this kind of brain damage. Volunteers who had damage to the BLA did this even though they said they did not expect the game to be fair.

Brain researchers have observed a pattern of behaviors associated with "easy marks" at risk of falling victim to scams.

People who have damage to the specific part of the brain associated with generosity tend to be:

  • Extremely aware of their surroundings, but don't form healthy "fears" of negative influences in their environments.
  • "Naturally" or "pathologically" generous, and don't learn from negative experiences after being generous with their resources, or don't care about losses enough to change their behavior.
  • Impulsively generous, giving away their resources without thinking about the consequences.

Of course, just as the Apostle Paul counseled Christians to "give hysterically," in a literal interpretation of the Greek text, many people are socially conditioned to give away their conditions.

To the extent giving things away is due to brain damage, however, the good news is that lesions in the BLA tend to be the result of atherosclerosis, happening over years or even decades, giving the sufferer opportunities to learn compensatory behaviors that can keep them out of poverty.

When the brain damage is due to stroke, there is little opportunity to learn a different way of relating to others.

Read full article

  • Ferreira-Garcia R, Fontenelle LF, Moll J, de Oliveira-Souza R. Pathological generosity: An atypical impulse control disorder after a left subcortical stroke. Neurocase. 2013 Aug 20.
  • Smith J. Brazilian stroke victim cannot stop helping others after developing pathological generosity because of changes in the brain. Daily Maily Online, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2414951/Brazilian-stroke-victim-stop-helping-developing-pathological-generosity-changes-brain.html, accessed 11 September 2013.
  • van Honk J, Eisenegger C, Terburg D, Stein DJ, Morgan B. Generous economic investments after basolateral amygdala damage. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2013 Feb 12. 110(7):2506-10. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1217316110. Epub 2013 Jan 22.
  • Photo courtesy of Quazie by Flickr : www.flickr.com/photos/quazie/578252290/
  • Photo courtesy of Comrade Foot by Flickr : www.flickr.com/photos/56380734@N05/8559675547

Your thoughts on this

User avatar Guest
Captcha