Study finds left-wing brain, right-wing brain

No need to click the link.

Let me guess....

Hummmm

Liberals are smarter and have more brainwave activity.:rolleyes:

Hopefully not your tax money at work.
 
Story only available to registered members. Please c&p.
 
Story only available to registered members.

Isn't that so typical of the liberals.

You have to reveal to them who you are when all you want to do is look at their crap.

Same with the NYT. They think they are better than everyone else. So, so typical.

:rolleyes:
 
You lazy S.O.B.'s... It took me 12 seconds to register for free, anyhow.

By Denise Gellene, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
September 10, 2007

Exploring the neurobiology of politics, scientists have found that liberals tolerate ambiguity and conflict better than conservatives because of how their brains work.

In a simple experiment reported todayin the journal Nature Neuroscience, scientists at New York University and UCLA show that political orientation is related to differences in how the brain processes information.

Previous psychological studies have found that conservatives tend to be more structured and persistent in their judgments whereas liberals are more open to new experiences. The latest study found those traits are not confined to political situations but also influence everyday decisions.

The results show "there are two cognitive styles -- a liberal style and a conservative style," said UCLA neurologist Dr. Marco Iacoboni, who was not connected to the latest research.

Participants were college students whose politics ranged from "very liberal" to "very conservative." They were instructed to tap a keyboard when an M appeared on a computer monitor and to refrain from tapping when they saw a W.

M appeared four times more frequently than W, conditioning participants to press a key in knee-jerk fashion whenever they saw a letter.

Each participant was wired to an electroencephalograph that recorded activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, the part of the brain that detects conflicts between a habitual tendency (pressing a key) and a more appropriate response (not pressing the key). Liberals had more brain activity and made fewer mistakes than conservatives when they saw a W, researchers said. Liberals and conservatives were equally accurate in recognizing M.

Researchers got the same results when they repeated the experiment in reverse, asking another set of participants to tap when a W appeared.

Frank J. Sulloway, a researcher at UC Berkeley's Institute of Personality and Social Research who was not connected to the study, said the results "provided an elegant demonstration that individual differences on a conservative-liberal dimension are strongly related to brain activity."

Analyzing the data, Sulloway said liberals were 4.9 times as likely as conservatives to show activity in the brain circuits that deal with conflicts, and 2.2 times as likely to score in the top half of the distribution for accuracy.

Sulloway said the results could explain why President Bush demonstrated a single-minded commitment to the Iraq war and why some people perceived Sen. John F. Kerry, the liberal Massachusetts Democrat who opposed Bush in the 2004 presidential race, as a "flip-flopper" for changing his mind about the conflict.

Based on the results, he said, liberals could be expected to more readily accept new social, scientific or religious ideas.

"There is ample data from the history of science showing that social and political liberals indeed do tend to support major revolutions in science," said Sulloway, who has written about the history of science and has studied behavioral differences between conservatives and liberals.

Lead author David Amodio, an assistant professor of psychology at New York University, cautioned that the study looked at a narrow range of human behavior and that it would be a mistake to conclude that one political orientation was better. The tendency of conservatives to block distracting information could be a good thing depending on the situation, he said.

Political orientation, he noted, occurs along a spectrum, and positions on specific issues, such as taxes, are influenced by many factors, including education and wealth. Some liberals oppose higher taxes and some conservatives favor abortion rights.

Still, he acknowledged that a meeting of the minds between conservatives and liberals looked difficult given the study results.

"Does this mean liberals and conservatives are never going to agree?" Amodio asked. "Maybe it suggests one reason why they tend not to get along."

denise.gellene@latimes.com
 
Amusing.

Now, some day soon, they'll find a way to genetically filter conservatives out of this world...
 
Yeah, by banning Republican marriage. I saw that on a bumper sticker the other day.
 
I click on the link and I don't have to now, nor did I ever have to register for that site. I guess that they only make democrats register.
 
What a bunch of asinine conclusions they got from this bogus study. They somehow managed to connect it to Bush because some people pressed the 'M' button too many times? Give me a break.

Probably the conservs were sitting there with their finger on the M button because they wanted to get done so they could get back to work, whereas the libs had to switch their doobie to the other hand, so they had more time to consider the letter on the screen.:D
 
Of course there is much more going on in the liberal mind; reason is being clouded with emotion and doubt. Hormones are released, chemical reactions are happening, synapses are firing...the fearful and/or angry mind is much more active then the rational mind.:eek:

Did anyone ever consider that the letter "W" being in this study might cause an angry reaction from the libs in the study?

"Each participant was wired to an electroencephalograph that recorded activity in the anterior cingulate cortex"

From Wikipedia:
"The anterior cingulate cortex can be divided anatomically based on attributed functions into executive (anterior), evaluative (posterior), cognitive (dorsal), and emotional (ventral) components (Bush et al., 2000). The ACC is connected with the prefrontal cortex and parietal cortex as well as the motor system and the frontal eye fields (Posner & DiGirolamo, 1998) making it a central station for processing top-down and bottom-up stimuli and assigning appropriate control to other areas in the brain. The ACC seems to be especially involved when effort is needed to carry out a task such as in early learning and problem solving (Allman et al., 2001). Many studies attribute functions such as error detection, anticipation of tasks, motivation, and modulation of emotional responses to the ACC (Bush et al., 2000; Nieuwenhuis et al., 2001; Posner & DiGirolamo, 1998)."


The study shows that liberals are ruled by emotion, IMO.:D
 

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