"To give or not to give: It's all about the brain" from APM's Marketplace

JONAH LEHRER: The first thing to note about giving away money is that it feels really good. For instance, several brain scanning experiments demonstrate that donating to a worthy cause leads to activation in the dopamine reward pathway. It's the same part of the brain that's turned on when we have sex, or eat a slice of chocolate cake. In fact, there is typically more "reward-related" activity when we donate money than we receive an equivalent amount. Giving is literally better than getting, at least from the perspective of the brain. But this generosity comes with a catch. Yes, we have altruistic instincts. Still, these instincts come with some real blind spots. Consider the work of Paul Slovic, a psychologist at the University of Oregon. He told undergraduates about a starving child named Rokia -- she lived in a crumbling refugee camp in Africa. His students acted with impressive generosity. They saw her emaciated body and haunting brown eyes and they donated, on average, about $2.50 to Save the Children.

View the Marketplace webpage of the story, here. Download the podcast here. See also: Proust Was a Neuroscientist, Decisive Moment, the, Why We Make Mistakes: How We Look Without Seeing, Forget Things in Seconds, and Are All Pretty Sure We Are Way Above Average, (PROUST WAS A NEUROSCIENTIST)PROUST WAS A NEUROSCIENTIST BY LEHRER, JONAH[AUTHOR]Paperback{Proust Was a Neuroscientist} on 2008

Teaching Doctors To Be Better Listeners from NPR Podcast Science Friday

If doctors listen more carefully to patients' conversations about work and family life, they can pick up clues that lead to better treatment, according to a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Author Dr. Alan Schwartz talks about training doctors to be better listeners.

Download the podcast here.

The Intelligence Of Crowds In 'The Perfect Swarm' from NPR: Science Friday Podcast

In his book The Perfect Swarm, Len Fisher talks about swarm intelligence -- where the collective ideas of a group add up to better solutions than any individual could have dreamed up, including an example of how UPS reorganized its driving routes using the logic of an ant colony.

Download the NPR Science Friday podcast here. Scientific American had this to say about the book:

Next time you get annoyed when you discover an army of ants marching through your kitchen pantry, think about this: these tiny insects could teach you how to make better decisions in your social, private and professional life. Sounds crazy? Not according to scientist and journalist Len Fisher. In his new book, The Perfect Swarm, he introduces us to the modern science of complexity—how intricate patterns grow out of simple rules. Research shows that such rules underlie the group behaviors of animals, such as bees and locusts, and Fisher explains how we can learn a thing or two from these basic laws. At the heart of the book lies swarm intelligence, a phenomenon that results when large groups of individuals—be they robots or guppies—behave in the same way, and their collective actions (presumably unbeknownst to the individuals) become intelligent. Ant colonies provide a good example, Fisher says. In search of food, individual ants initially roam an area at random. Yet those animals that happen to be on the fastest route to a food source will return to the nest first. The pheromones they lay down on their trail then allow other ants to use that same route. By the time the remaining pioneers return to the nest, more animals will have already laid down more pheromones on the fastest route, which quickly becomes the predominant one.

See also: Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software, The Essence Of Chaos (The Jessie and John Danz Lecture Series), Chaos: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions), Nonlinear Dynamics And Chaos: With Applications To Physics, Biology, Chemistry, And Engineering (Studies in Nonlinearity)