UC Berkley-based researchers recently found a crucial link between the quantity of sleep and how generous a person is willing to be.
Human beings are one of the most sociable creatures on this planet. Thanks to the generosity of this species. But, what keeps a person generous? Resources? Empathy? Kindness? Maybe some of this, but may also be something as simple as sleep. Yes, that’s right, sleep can also make people generous.
UC Berkeley-based researchers have recently published a paper on PLOS biology that discovered a crucial link between generosity and the quantity of sleep.
In the study, researchers distributed their subjects in three groups of different scales. They studied generous activities within individuals, between individual ensembles, and between societies. And, the findings are quite intriguing.
Not being allowed to sleep for a night, an average person lost the willpower to carry an old fellow’s grocery bags. A similar impact was observed when an ensemble of average people had lost a couple of nights of sleep.
When the authors scanned the US charity archives, they observed that 1-hour sleep loss during daylight saving transition led to a loss of millions of USD donations in the US. That means a meagre 1 hour sleep-loss directly influenced philanthropy on a grandeur scale.
Along with crunching large-scale data, the authors performed fMRI scans of people who were deprived of sleep and had to fill out a questionnaire. Observably, sleep loss led to a reduction in activity and temporary deactivation of certain key nodes at the social cognition centre of the brain.
But this change is temporary, the researchers noted. Sleeping for the requisite hours soon normalizes activities in the social centre of the brain, and leaves people as helpful as nature has made them.
Sumon Basak 