Brains Are Wired For Cooperation, Animal Study Suggests

Looking at the singing patterns of plain-tailed wrens sheds light on the human inclination to work cooperatively, a new study suggests.

The Science study, conducted by researchers from Johns Hopkins University, suggests that we're all wired to work together.

Researchers took to the Ecuadorian forests to examine the song patterns of plain-tailed wrens to come to this conclusion. These kinds of wrens sing together in a seemingly unified singing voice in an ABCD pattern -- with the male wren singing the A and C parts, and the female wren singing the B and D parts.

Researchers looked at the activity of the brain region responsible for singing in the wrens. They found that "neurons reacted more strongly to the duet song -- with both the male and female birds singing -- over singing their own parts alone," study researcher Eric Fortune, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins, said in a statement.

"In fact, the brain's responses to duet songs were stronger than were responses to any other sound. ... It looked like the brains of wrens are wired to cooperate," he added.

Even though the study was just in birds, Fortune said that the brains of vertebrate animals -- including birds, humans, cats, fish and bears, among many others -- are very similar. The findings support that even humans are built to work cooperatively, he said.

"We found that the brain of each individual participant prefers the combined activity over his or her own part," Fortune said in the statement.

Similarly, a recent study in the journal Current Biology shows that human children enjoy working cooperatively more than chimps. The 3-year-olds in the study chose to work together 78 percent of the time to complete a task, while the chimps only worked together 58 percent of the time (which, researchers said, meant the chimps chose their work styles randomly).

"A preference for doing things together instead of alone differentiates humans from one of our closely related primate cousins," the study's researcher, Daniel Haun, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, told PhysOrg.com.

Comments

[Social Construct]

04:35 AM on 11/06/2011

Get this memo to Congress, ASAP!

[backwaterbandit]

01:01 PM on 11/06/2011

well said. boehner and cantor and obama seem to be the major stumbling blocks.... let us remove these dysfunctional children and find those who can play together in the same sand box

[TomMartin]

07:06 PM on 11/05/2011

In my high school chemistry lab, I was supposed to work together with my partner, but in neither semester did either partner give me anything to do, and I was too shy to say anything. It was hell.

[aj7483]

02:37 AM on 11/06/2011

I hear you TomMartin, the same thing happened to me, and I ended up failing chemistry three times in a row in college. I tried my best--spent ALL my time studying hard, never went out or anything. But in those labs, I just couldn't concentrate. I spent all my energy trying to communicate properly with my partner--speaking the right way, body language, facial expressions, etc--and was not able to focus only on the work like I wanted to. I'm not stupid--I pulled a 4.0 in high school; however, that was independent study! I did well because I was allowed to work ALONE. All this emphasis on "group work" works great for the majority of students, who prefer to work together, but completely ignores and denies the existence of more introverted students who actually do work better on their own without the "help" that "everybody" is supposed to benefit from.
I hate articles like this that insist, too the applause of the extroverted majority, that all people really want and need to be social in everything all the time, and anyone who is not wired that way is not a whole or deserving person and needs to "be fixed" or "grow up." Some people literally cannot think with another person in their project and their space--it's like static interference. We do not choose this. We do not do this on purpose. World, please acknowledge our existence and our humanity.

[insanityman84]

12:41 PM on 11/05/2011

This would actually have to be true, otherwise we could not do anything at all. Any muscle movements, speech patterns, etc. The nervous system has to 'cooperate' with the brain's signals, or we would die immediately. You could look at it from a cellular level too, if the cells do not cooperate with the 'laws' to survive, in other words, do not do what is necessary to survive (& multiply is applicable) then they too would die out. So cooperation then is paramount when it comes to survival; without it, nothing could live.