“Body am I, and soul”–thus speaks the child….
But the awakened and knowing say: body am I entirely, and nothing else; and soul is only a word for something about the body. — Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Book 1.
A day after reading what Zarathustra spoke, I saw an article in The Atlantic called The Man Who Couldn’t Stop Giving. To quote the first few paragraphs:
In the early 1990s, a quiet man named João quit his job running the human-resources department of an insurance company in Rio de Janeiro and began selling french fries from a street cart. The fries quickly proved popular, in part because they were delicious—thin and crisp and golden. Even more enticing, João often served them up for free. All you had to do was ask, and he’d scoop some into a box, no charge. What money he did take in, he frequently gave away to children begging in the street or used to buy them sweets. Day after day, he came home to his wife and son without a single real in his pocket.
In his previous life, João—a chubby man with pointy ears and arched black eyebrows—had been stern and serious, prone to squirreling money away. But after suffering a health crisis in 1990, at age 49, he wanted to live differently. “I saw death from close up,” he would often say. “Now I want to be in high spirits.” And nothing made him happier than giving. To those who didn’t know him well, he must have seemed like the embodiment of selflessness—the Saint Francis of Rio de Janeiro.
He sounds like a very spiritual person, doesn’t he? If anything would indicate that we are animated by more than just chemistry, it is the generosity and love that this man radiated.
But then the article continues,
What’s most interesting about João’s story, though, is that his new outlook resulted not from a spiritual awakening but from brain damage caused by a stroke. … [He] became “pathologically generous”—compulsively driven to give. His carefree attitude toward money led to confrontations with his family, especially his brother-in-law, who co-owned the french-fry cart. But even when his family berated him, and the cart went out of business, and he was reduced to living on his mother’s pension, João refused to stop. Giving simply made him too happy.
It turns out that one area of our brain gives us a dopamine rush when we do something generous, but another area regulates that impulse so we don’t go broke. João’s stroke knocked out that second area, so his generosity went untempered.
Isn’t it interesting that a purely physical change to the brain can produce such a supposedly spiritual result?
Maybe Zarathustra was right!
Path of the Beagle 