When giving - even paying taxes - makes you happy

From Friday's Register-Guard:

Researchers at the University of Oregon have found a connection between acts of charity and a pleasure center deep in the brain, a discovery that offers new insight into why people help others.

Economics professor Bill Harbaugh, psychology professor Ulrich Mayr and graduate student Dan Burghart have discovered that giving away money makes people feel good by activating primitive pleasure nodes associated with basic needs. The results show that charitable giving, even just seeing someone else's money being given, pleases people in much the same way as eating, being with friends or even falling in love.

( Read the rest of the article, 'Charity: It's not a no-brainer' by Greg Bolt )

Ulrich's in my department, and Bill's married to our department's expert on imaginary friends.

Here's more coverage, from today's New York Times.

This reminds me of the time I actually got into an argument with a guy gathering signatures to rescind a local phone tax that was helping to support the library. The simplistic "taxes are bad" mentality is so vexing.