While we’re on the subject of politics, at least as related to office neatness, here is another tidbit from my alma mater, UCLA.
Marco Iacoboni and his colleagues in the Jane and Terry Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior used fMRI to watch the brain activity of ten Democrats and ten Republicans while they looked at photos of George Bush, John Kerry, and Ralph Nader. Their work just appeared in the online journal Neuropsychologia.
According to the authors, viewing the face of an opposition candidate increased activation in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the anterior cingulate gyrus, the insula, and the anterior poles of the temporal lobes. The results appear to be most obvious in Democrats viewing George Bush.
The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex has been implicated in many higher order cognitive functions, including working visual memory. Specifically, this area appears to participate in the ongoing monitoring of visual input, which makes sense given the task of looking at pictures.
The anterior cingulate gyrus may be involved with our emotional responses to complex stimuli, again logical in this case.
Changes in brain activity correlated with the participants’ stated emotional reactions to the candidates. In other words, the more negatively one feels about the opposing candidates and the more positively one feels about one’s own candidate, the larger the response of these brain areas. Republicans reacted more to Ralph Nader, but Democrats did not.
As fun as such studies are, part of me wonders exactly how useful this approach may be. What exactly have we learned that we didn’t know before? That politics is an emotional subject for people?
The authors offer this justification for their study: “Political attitudes can be powerful forces, motivating action and influencing perception, but there has been little to no investigation of their neural correlates.” Okay, but tell us why it is important for us to understand the neural correlates of politics, and not just attitudes in general (I do think there is a rationale, but we need to articulate it better.)
One of the challenges of new imaging technologies is learning to ask the right questions, and to provide a useful rationale for asking these questions and not others.
What is truly remarkable are the many free educational tools available through the center–teachers may want to take a minute or two to visit.
