I can resist everything but temptation
Medical boffins have tuning their scanners so that they
can find out what it is inside the brain that causes temptation.
According to the proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences, which we use in the Fudzilla outhouse following the shortage of
paper, new brain imaging gear developed by Josh Greene and Joe
Paxton at Harvard University has been tuned to spot any demons in your
head.
The pair used a computer game while their machine
measured neural activity. During the game you could gain money by
predicting the outcome of coin flips. Correctly guess heads or tails, you get
some cash. In the first one it was impossible to cheat and in the
second one gamers were rewarded based on self-reported accuracy after the
flips, and therefore could fudge their results.
What separates the well-behaved from the poorly-behaved
apparently was not the ability to control your temptations but rather
what kind of temptations you have. Giving in to the devil apparently depends on what he is
offering. It all apparently depends more on the nature of your automatic
urges than your ability to control them.
Those who acted honestly showed no increased activity in
control-related areas relative to others who guessed wrong but did not
have the opportunity to cheat. Honest reporting of scores, then,
didn’t require will-power, these participants simply did not feel the
urge to cheat. (Suckers. sub.ed.)
Those who acted honestly took no longer to do so, on
average, when they had the opportunity to cheat than when they did not. This
indicates that humans have the capacity to achieve a state of “moral
grace” devoid of selfish temptation. Such humans have no chance working in
public relations for an IT company.
