More on the Brain Structures of Liberals, Conservatives
You may recall I reported here a week or two ago on the new study finding an association between brain structures and political beliefs. It is possible to distinguish liberals from conservatives based on these structures.
Now here, in a brief — a minute or so — interview with the British researchers themselves, is a clarification of that study. They explain that there is no way to know whether those structures cause those belief systems to develop, or whether — in fact — the beliefs cause the development of those structures!
Watch:
2 thoughts on “More on the Brain Structures of Liberals, Conservatives”
This stuff sounds a bit too much like eugenics to me.
Given the recent findings on the plasticity of physical brain development — in which structural growth has been found to be affected by experience — it seems plausible to me.
For instance, here’s a portion of an abstract from a scholarly paper on the subject of plasticity:
“The brain is remarkably responsive to its interactions with the environment, and its morphology is altered by experience in measurable ways. Histological examination of the brains of animals exposed to either a complex (‘enriched’) environment or learning paradigm, compared with appropriate controls, has illuminated the nature of experience-induced morphological plasticity in the brain … Thus, experience induces multiple forms of plasticity in the brain that are apparently regulated, at least in part, by independent mechanisms.”
From http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=355012