Right from an early age, even before they can talk, people find that helping others is inherently rewarding, and they learn to be sensitive to who is helpful and who is not. Regions of the brain activated by helping are the same as those activated when people process other pleasurable rewards.

(1)Anyone who assumes that babies are Just little egoists who enter me world needing to be socialized so that they can learn to care about others is overlooking other tendencies as species-typical. Humans are born predisposed to care how they relate to others. A growing body of research is persuading neuroscientists that Baruch Spinoza's* seventeenth-century proposal better captures the full range of tensions humans grow up with. "The endeavor to live in a shared, peaceful agreement with others is an extension of the endeavor to preserve oneself" Emerging evidence is drawing psychologists and economists alike to conclude that "our brains are wired to cooperate with others" as well as to reward or punish others for mutual cooperation.

Perhaps not surprisingly, helpful urges are activated most readily when people deal with each other face-to-face. Specialized regions of the human brain are given over to interpreting other people's vocalizations and facial expressions. Right from the first days of life, every healthy human being is avidly monitoring those nearby, learning to recognize, interpret, and even imitate then' expressions. An innate capacity for empathizing with others becomes apparent within the first six months. By early adulthood most of us will have become experts at reading other people's intentions. (2)We are so attuned to the inner thoughts and feelings of those around us that even professionals trained, lot to respond emotionally to the suffering of others find it difficult not to be moved. Therapists face particular challenges in this respect. Empathy, the stock-in-trade of psychotherapists because it really does produce better results, turns out to be their worst nightmare as well. People who deal day-in-and-day-out with the troubles of others face such occupational hazards as "vicarious** traumatization" and "compassion fatigue," or face the threat of "catching" a client's depression.

New discoveries by evolutionarily minded psychologists, economists, and neuroscientists are propelling the cooperative side of human nature to center stage. New findings about how irrational, how emotional, how caring, and even how selfless human decisions can be are transforming disciplines long grounded in the premise that the world is a competitive place where to be a rational actor means being a selfish one. Researchers from diverse fields are converging*** on the realization: (3)while humans can indeed be very selfish, in terms of empathic responses to others and our eagerness to help and share with them, humans are also quite unusual, notably different from other apes.

• *Baruch Spinoza: A Dutch philosopher (1632-77).
• **vicarious:experienced in the imagination through the feelings or actions of another person.
• ***converge: meet or join at a particular point.