NEW YORK: Want to light up the pleasure centre in your brain? Just pay your taxes on time, and then donate a little extra to feed the children of the lesser God who hardly get to eat two square meals a day.

A team of international researchers has carried out a study and found that doing those deeds give one the same sort of satisfaction one derives from feeding his or her own hunger pangs, the ScienceDaily reported.

"What this shows to someone who designs tax policy is that taxes aren't all bad. Paying taxes can make citizens happy. People are, to varying degrees, pure altruists. On top of that they like that warm glow they get from charitable giving. Until now we couldn't trace that in the brain," lead researcher Prof Ulrich Mayr was quoted as saying.

The team came to the conclusion after analysing a group of 19 women -- the researchers gave the participants USD 100 and then scanned their brains with functional magnetic resonance imaging.

They monitored the brain activity of the participants as their money went to food banks through mandatory taxation, and as they made choices about whether to give more money voluntarily or keep it for themselves.

The participants lay on their backs in the scanner for an hour-long session and viewed the financial transfers on a computer screen.

The scanner used a super-cooled magnet, carefully tuned radio waves and powerful computers to calculate what parts of the brain were active as subjects saw their money go to the food banks and made 'yes' or 'no' decisions on the additional giving.