Medical boffins have tuning their scanners so that they can find out what it is inside the brain that causes temptation.

According to the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which we use in the Fudzilla outhouse following the shortage of paper, new brain imaging gear developed by Josh Greene and Joe Paxton at Harvard University has been tuned to spot any demons in your head.

The pair used a computer game while their machine measured neural activity. During the game you could gain money by predicting the outcome of coin flips. Correctly guess heads or tails, you get some cash. In the first one it was impossible to cheat and in the second one gamers were rewarded based on self-reported accuracy after the flips, and therefore could fudge their results.

What separates the well-behaved from the poorly-behaved apparently was not the ability to control your temptations but rather what kind of temptations you have. Giving in to the devil apparently depends on what he is offering. It all apparently depends more on the nature of your automatic urges than your ability to control them.

Those who acted honestly showed no increased activity in control-related areas relative to others who guessed wrong but did not have the opportunity to cheat. Honest reporting of scores, then, didn’t require will-power, these participants simply did not feel the urge to cheat. (Suckers. sub.ed.)

Those who acted honestly took no longer to do so, on average, when they had the opportunity to cheat than when they did not. This indicates that humans have the capacity to achieve a state of “moral grace” devoid of selfish temptation. Such humans have no chance working in public relations for an IT company.