Forrest's Ramblings about Stuff

In the run-up to the 2004 election, researchers at Emory University used brain scans to analyze the responses of highly partisan Democrats and Republicans to negative information about their favored candidate.

The results provided a physiological confirmation of what might be expected:

"We did not see any increased activation of the parts of the brain normally engaged during reasoning," says Drew Westen, director of clinical psychology at Emory who led the study. "What we saw instead was a network of emotion circuits lighting up, including circuits hypothesized to be involved in regulating emotion, and circuits known to be involved in resolving conflicts." [ ... ]

Once partisans had come to completely biased conclusions -- essentially finding ways to ignore information that could not be rationally discounted -- not only did circuits that mediate negative emotions like sadness and disgust turn off, but subjects got a blast of activation in circuits involved in reward -- similar to what addicts receive when they get their fix, Westen explains.

"None of the circuits involved in conscious reasoning were particularly engaged," says Westen. "Essentially, it appears as if partisans twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope until they get the conclusions they want, and then they get massively reinforced for it, with the elimination of negative emotional states and activation of positive ones."

Ha-ha, those stupid partisans, right? But wait ... how did the researchers know that the "facts" they presented were actually true? Did they pick them up on TV? News magazines, perhaps? I'm pretty sure they couldn't have witnessed all the alleged events they used in their study themselves. The media isn't always that trustworthy these days. (I just spent like a zillion hours looking for links to back that up, but I just want to get this blog post done now.)

While I suspect the subjects of this study may have been more extreme in the rigidity of their beliefs than they should have been, there comes a point where a visceral "bullshit detector" becomes absolutely necessary.

Of course the problem is, while my "bullshit detector" is well-adjusted and my distrust aimed pretty squarely at the White House and the greedy soullless multinational corporations they work for, there are fools our there whose distrust runs to the "liberal intellegentsia" or something.

This research clearly shows that while I've got my head on straight (of course), it's going to be pretty much impossible to get those unthinking idiots to see the light.

(orignally seen on Slashdot, although the article linked to there is an ad-laden summary of the one I linked above.)