Political leanings and the mind/brain connection

From the online section of Smithsonian Magazine:

Study Predicts Political Beliefs with 83% Accuracy

If you want to know people’s politics, tradition said to study their parents. In fact, the party affiliation of someone’s parents can predict the child’s political leanings about around 70 percent of the time.

But new research, published yesterday in the journal PLOS ONE, suggests what mom and dad think isn’t the endgame when it comes to shaping a person’s political identity. Ideological differences between partisans may reflect distinct neural processes, and they can predict who’s right and who’s left of center with 82.9 percent accuracy, outperforming the “your parents pick your party” model. It also out-predicts another neural model based on differences in brain structure, which distinguishes liberals from conservatives with 71.6 percent accuracy.

The study matched publicly available party registration records with the names of 82 American participants whose risk-taking behavior during a gambling experiment was monitored by brain scans. The researchers found that liberals and conservatives don’t differ in the risks they do or don’t take, but their brain activity does vary while they’re making decisions.

The idea that the brains of Democrats and Republicans may be hard-wired to their beliefs is not new. Previous research has shown that during MRI scans, areas linked to broad social connectedness, which involves friends and the world at large, light up in Democrats’ brains. Republicans, on the other hand, show more neural activity in parts of the brain associated with tight social connectedness, which focuses on family and country.

Other scans have shown that brain regions associated with risk and uncertainty, such as the fear-processing amygdala, differ in structure in liberals and conservatives. And different architecture means different behavior. Liberals tend to seek out novelty and uncertainty, while conservatives exhibit strong changes in attitude to threatening situations. The former are more willing to accept risk, while the latter tends to have more intense physical reactions to threatening stimuli.

Building on this, the new research shows that Democrats exhibited significantly greater activity in the left insula, a region associated with social and self-awareness, during the task. Republicans, however, showed significantly greater activity in the right amygdala, a region involved in our fight-or flight response system.

“If you went to Vegas, you won’t be able to tell who’s a Democrat or who’s a Republican, but the fact that being a Republican changes how your brain processes risk and gambling is really fascinating,” says lead researcher Darren Schreiber, a University of Exeter professor who’s currently teaching at Central European University in Budapest. “It suggests that politics alters our worldview and alters the way our brains process.”

Politics isn’t the first to cause structural changes in the brain. More than a decade ago, researchers used brain scans to show that London cab drivers’ gray matter grew larger to help them store a mental map of the city. There more time they spent on the road, the bigger their hippocampi, an area associated with navigation, became.

This implies that despite the political leanings seen through our brains, how we vote—and thus the cause of our political affiliations—may not be set in stone, Schreiber says.

“If we believe that we’re hardwired for our political views, then it’s really easy for me to discount in you in a conversation. ‘Oh, you’re just a conservative because you have a red brain,’ or ‘Oh, you’re a liberal because you have a blue brain,’” Schreiber explains. “But that’s just not the case. The brain changes. The brain is dynamic.”



Read more: http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/science/2013/02/study-predicts-political-beliefs-with-83-percent-accuracy/#ixzz2LAN3MY9M

Though of course it would be easier to just ask them....

Interesting!

It seems to support the old wisdom that there are two kinds of people in this world: those who divide the world into two kinds of people and those who don't.

I thought it was also interesting that the actions during gambling were indistinguishable, just the brain responses. It means maybe our dratted congress COULD compromise if they just leave all the social theory out and just look at the final result.

That's a very optimistic way of looking at it. But remember we're only talking about risk taking behavior, so I think it more likely just means that both sides of the isle can be equally corrupt, just for different reasons.

For some reason they left the most important sentence in the article for the very end:

“If we believe that we’re hardwired for our political views, then it’s really easy for me to discount in you in a conversation. ‘Oh, you’re just a conservative because you have a red brain,’ or ‘Oh, you’re a liberal because you have a blue brain,’” Schreiber explains. “But that’s just not the case. The brain changes. The brain is dynamic.”

TAXI DRIVER ESCAPES DEATH AFTER KILLING HIPPOPOTAMUS HIPPOCAMPUS

Updated Tuesday, October 9 2012 at 00:00 GMT+3

By James Munyeki

A taxi driver on Monday escaped death narrowly when the vehicle he was driving rammed into a hippopotamus at Manguo village, along the Nyahururu-Nyeri road.

Edward Gitahi was driving home at about 1:00am when he came across a herd of hippopotamuses crossing the road and as he made frantic efforts to avoid hitting them, he lost control of the vehicle, which hit one of the animals killing it on the spot.

hi

Yo

That was my Valentine's Day wish too!!!

I'm with Eldo (I think? ). Environment and neural plasticity seem to be the common factors.

All it's showing is different thought processes that could have been discovered as well with a good questionaire. The brain activity is something of a red herring since it should be obvious by now that different parts of the brain light up during different thinking processes; it doesn't indicate the hardware is different, just the mental software. But the brain activity scan is actually a quicker way of getting at the result than inflicting a set of questions, which I think is kind of neat.

This was on a BBC programne, very lengthy report,
Scientists are set to release the first batch of data from a project designed to create the first map of the human brain.

The project could help shed light on why some people are naturally scientific, musical or artistic.

Some of the first images were shown at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Boston.

I found out how researchers are developing new brain imaging techniques for the project by having my own brain scanned.

Scientists at Massachusetts General Hospital are pushing brain imaging to its limit using a purpose built scanner. It is one of the most powerful scanners in the world.

The scanner's magnets need 22MW of electricity - enough to power a nuclear submarine.

The researchers invited me to have my brain scanned. I was asked if I wanted "the 10-minute job or the 45-minute 'full monty'" which would give one of the most detailed scans of the brain ever carried out. Only 50 such scans have ever been done.

I