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Altruistic or selfish? The researchers of the State of Milan and ofItalian Institute of Technology (Iit) have shown that this certainly depends on social and behavioral factors, but also on brain mechanisms that affect a particular area of our brain, the amygdala. I study, Published on Nature Neuroscienceinvestigated the causes that lead to altruistic or selfish attitudes in the animal world, with the aim of providing an ever more detailed knowledge of the mechanism underlying these behaviors to better understand all those pathological conditions, such as neuropsychiatric and neurodegenerative diseases, in which social behavior is not functional. Think of a marked lack of empathy or excessive antisocial behavior. The team of researchers is in fact already working on various fronts, for example by applying this model to the study of pathologies such as autism, schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s. Among the objectives is to identify a single molecule within the circuit studied to provide a drug target for a specific therapy for social sphere disorders. But let’s go in order.
Choices are influenced by social and neurobiological factors
The study fits into a precise context and was also possible thanks to the fact that for about 10 years now in animals aspects related to the emotional and affective sphere are studied: historically it was thought that this type of cognitive and social functions were somehow reserved for human beings and not for other mammals, as is now demonstrated by scientific literature. “The study began about five years ago. With the first tests for the development of a new test, we wondered if mice were able to perform actions that could then lead to benefits for their peer, making a greater effort to share a reward with their partner – explains the researcher and neuroscientist Diego Scheggiawhich conducted the study between IIT and Statale di Milano – once the model was fine-tuned, by analyzing the behavior, we used this test to go and study the neurobiology underlying these choices”. The main interest of the study was in fact understand what influenced the decision-making process, discovering its neurobiological and social factors. Tests normally performed with humans have been adapted such as the “dictator game”, in which a subject can choose whether or not to share food with a partner. “We noted that belonging to the same social context had an influence, as did social dominance: animals like humans have a social hierarchy within their group and those in the more dominant ranks tended to share rewards preferentially.” Splinter continues. The next step was to investigate, from a neurobiological point of view, what were the circuits linked to this type of behavior in the brain, discovering that thebasolateral amygdala “shows higher neuronal activity in more altruistic animals”. These very precise analyzes are possible thanks to the chemogeneticswhich allows you to activate and deactivate individual brain circuits, to understand which ones are involved in a certain process: “By silencing these specific cells, we saw that this altruistic predisposition was lost.”. However, the brain does not work in watertight compartments so the analysis then moved on to the connections between the basolateral amygdala and the prefrontal cortexinvolved in many cognitive processes, obtaining the same behavior: by shutting down those cells almost all animals became more selfish.
The implications of the study in the battle against neuropsychiatric and degenerative diseases
The functioning of these mechanisms discovered in mice could be similar in humans: “It’s possible that it works the same way for humans – specifies Scheggia – The prefrontal cortex and the amygdala are not randomly chosen regions of the brain: we know that the amygdala is involved in functions related to sociality also in humans, and the prefrontal cortex also has a predominant role of control over many cognitive functions in the sphere social”. The results achieved can be applied to dysfunctional and pathological models, which will be useful in the study of neuropsychiatric diseases: “Many are associated with disorders in the social sphere, we want to use this model to then be able to translate it into humans. We are currently using models of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s to understand, and in the future identify, the presence of a possible target, thus directly acting on those social deficits that manifest themselves in many neuropsychiatric conditions”. The implications of the research findings are not limited to neurodegenerative diseases: “We are studying the genetic factors that predispose to certain pathologies and we are investigating how these models of selfishness and altruism can be altered in genetic diseases that predispose to schizophrenia and autism.- tells Francis Papaleohead of the Genetics of Cognition laboratory of IIT who participated in the study – The idea is that from an early age these circuits don’t work well and therefore the subject is unable to develop some social-cognitive skills. Our aim is to understand which cellular subtypes are not formed properly, intervening at the beginning to then be able to correct them”.
But is there a genetic predisposition to altruism and selfishness? “This is difficult to say but we cannot exclude that there is something innate in each of us that can be considered a sort of predisposition. For example, we have seen that the animals that at the end of the test express preferences that tend to be altruistic are also those that have a greater interest in sociability” Splinter says. “There are genetic predispositions that make us more or less sensitive to others – concludes Papaleo – autism and schizophrenia have a high genetic component therefore there is a little predisposition to alterations of the socio-cognitive sphere. However, there is no gene for altruism or selfishness”.
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