TOW #8 - What Makes a Hero by Elizabeth Svoboda

Marjorie Taylor's piece of work titled Warm Glow is based on her husband's and his colleagues' fMRI scans of brains. The colored areas shown represent the brain regions that showed heightened activity that are related to making charitable decisions. Source: www.surfacedesign.org

                In Elizabeth Svoboda's article "What Makes a Hero?", the author makes an attempt to prove that there is a scientific reasoning behind heroic feats to the readers of Discovery magazines. Svoboda shows how characteristics like valor and fearlessness tie with a person's brain. She starts out with an anecdote of a woman named Shirley Dygert in order to hook her readers in and to put them in the shoes of a 54-year-old woman who was saved by a guy named Dave Hartsock. Dygert was skydiving for the first time with her instructor, but as they opened the parachute to stop their free fall, the chute did not open all the way and the backup parachute became tangled. Hartsock decided to position his body so that he could cushion Dygert's fall, and when they landed, he suffered a severe blow on his spinal cord, ultimately paralyzing him from the neck down. Dygert exclaimed that his action "absolutely amazed" her because he had "that much love for another person." "Why?" Svoboda asks, allowing the audience to participate and think. Apparently, when a person does a good deed, a place in the brain called nucleus accumbens releases the pleasure chemical dopamine. While egoists show less activity in this part of the brain when donating their money to charity, altruists show more. Svoboda draws the comparison between the satisfaction of giving money to others  and the satisfaction of ingesting an addicting drug to show how good it feels to do a heroic deed. Recent discovery shows how meditating can help people to train their minds to be more selfless, and the researchers found this out by having some participants to practice meditation while having others to practice a technique known as cognitive reappraisal. When both groups played the game, the participants who practiced meditation helped out unfortunate victims more than the other participants did. By adding all these details about the experiment, Svoboda increases her credibility a lot. I believe that her use of anecdotes, comparison, and descriptive details really allowed me to see bravery in a whole new way.