Coveting May Be Hardwired In Brain

(What if we would only covet anther’s qualities that would lead to community building??
Maybe this is what spirituality and religion is all about? seeking the good not only for ourselves,  but others..)

From the 29 May 2012 article at Medical News Today

Coveting, or wanting what others have, may be hardwired in the brain, according to new research from France. We see it in children at play, the toy the other child is enjoying is more desirable. We do it with fashion items, accessories, cars, “keeping up with the Joneses”, where the value assigned to an object increases when it is desired by others.

Now a team from INSERM in Paris has shown that this tendency is not just psychological, but due to specific brain mechanisms that are essential for what has long been known as “mimetic desire”, a characteristic first described by French philosopher René Girard in the 1960s when he began to write about desires and proposed that we borrow our desires from others, and this explains much of human behavior.

Co-author Mathias Pessiglione and colleagues write about their study of how they unravelled mimetic desires in the brain in the 23 May online issue of The Journal of Neuroscience.

The idea of mimetic desire is that we value objects not only in terms of their intrinsic qualities, such as how useful they are, what they do, and what they look like, but also in terms of how much they are desired by others. …

Related articles

• Thou can’t not covet (sciencenews.org)