Taking a Morality shower

Recently Anand posted at the Kitchen about our superstitious brain. There's more proof for that now. A recent study reported in the New Scientist has the scoop. Our perception of moral standing improves after a shower.

Those who were given an opportunity to wash their hands after recalling incidents of immoral behaviour showed signs of a clearer conscious than those who had not washed.

"After we feel morally threatened, we have this deep psychological urge to cleanse ourselves," says Chen-Bo Zhong at the University of Toronto, Canada, who led the study.

During my student days in Vivekananda college, Chennai I often heard the well-meaning holyheads talk about how physical purity is the spark for inner purity. That moral claptrap is a load of baloney that typifies how our brain works (superstitiously and unreasonably, that is).