Political Brain Games

By SAM URETSKY

In the April 26, 2011 issue of Current Biology, a team from the University College London Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, London, published a study titled “Political Orientations Are Correlated with Brain Structure in Young Adults.” The key points, from the article abstract are “In a large sample of young adults, we related self-reported political attitudes to gray matter volume using structural MRI. We found that greater liberalism was associated with increased gray matter volume in the anterior cingulate cortex, whereas greater conservatism was associated with increased volume of the right amygdala.”

This report, and others confirming it, put new meaning into the question of nature versus nurture, as reflected in a 2014 study, “What contributes to individual differences in brain structure?” Political science, once a particularly unscientific study, could now find roots in neuroanatomy and neurobiology. With wealth and power riding on every election, the ability to control the conservatism or liberalism of the population had greater importance than simply convincing people that a set of policy decisions would be beneficial to them.

The amygdala is an almond shaped structure located inside the anterior-inferior (lower front) temporal lobe. The amygdala gets its name from its almond shape and is part of the limbic system, the section of the brain concerned with instinct and mood. It controls the basic emotions including fear, pleasure and anger, and drives such as hunger, dominance and libido.

In 1999, there was an important paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America: “Linguistic threat activates the human amygdala.” It had been recognized that a direct threat of harm, something as simple as looking down from a great height, or an encounter with an enemy, could stimulate the amygdala, but so could threatening words, even if they were not presented as a direct threat. Simply, being threatened by an assailant with a knife will stimulate the amygdala, but so will reading the words “an assailant with a knife.”

There does not seem to be a comparable trigger mechanism for the anterior cingulate cortex, but this region of the brain may have a unique method of stimulation, reflected in the study “Anterior Cingulate Cortex, Error Detection, and the Online Monitoring of Performance” published in the journal Science, May 1998. Simply, the anterior cingulate cortex “contributes to performance monitoring by detecting errors.” This would apply to conflicts in which a question is answered incorrectly when the correct answer is known. The result is that the recent election was significant in terms of both amygdala and the ACC,

The challenge, which has divided the United States has been between the two types of neurostimulus, the threat stimulus and the error stimulus. Eugene Robinson, in the Washington Post, had a column headed, “Trump stokes resentment toward minorities. Republicans just smile.” His colleague, Dana Milbank, wrote a satire “Is there no evil the Democrats won’t commit?” Milbank wrote “If President Trump is telling the truth — and why would we suspect otherwise? — Democrats are trying to open America’s borders and fill the country with MS-13 gang killers and drug dealers who will turn the United States into Venezuela, destroy Medicare, trash the economy, and otherwise bury every white man, woman and child eyebrow deep in drugs.” The New York Times published a report, “Trump Closes Out a Campaign Built on Fear, Anger and Division,” aimed at stimulating fear and anger – amygdala responses. “President Trump on Monday closed out an us-against-them midterm election campaign that was built on dark themes of fear, nationalism and racial animosity …”

The studies imply that there are effective methods of stimulating conservative-liberal bias, although it’s not completely clear how effective they are. In May 2018, a Survey Monkey survey reported that only 13% of the United States electorate trusted President Trump’s honesty, but at the same time, the weekly Gallup approval poll rated the President in the usual low 40s.

David Axelrod, President Obama’s political adviser, speaking of President Trump’s efforts at amygdala stimulation said, “This freneticism at the end . . . him ratcheting up to a new level of histrionics and fear, the question is, ‘Is there a point of diminishing returns? Do these tactics at once offend some people but also appear so fundamentally contrived that even some who are inclined to vote for Republicans say, you lost me here?” It may work that way. Tactics that go too far in stimulating the amygdala will also stimulate the ACC and see what happens next.

Sam Uretsky is a writer and pharmacist living in New York. Email sdu01@outlook.com.

From The Progressive Populist, December 1, 2018

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