It’s election season again. Every 4 years, October becomes the purgatory month of politics. But this year, it’s even more complicated, being juxtaposed against a chaotic mosaic of a viral pandemic, economic travails, social upheaval, and exceptionally toxic political hyperpartisanship.
The widespread expectation is that citizens will vote for their party’s candidates, but there is now a body of evidence suggesting that our brains may be pre-wired to be liberal or conservative.
Enter neuro-politics. This discipline is younger than neuro-economics, neuro-law, neuro-ethics, neuro-marketing, neuro-art, neuro-culture, or neuro-esthetics. Neuro-politics focuses on the intersection of politics with neuroscience.1 However, there are many antecedents to neuro-politics reflected in the writings of Plato, Aristotle, Niccolò Machiavelli, John Locke, Baruch Spinoza, Henri Bergson, William James, and others.
Neuro-politics attempts to generate data to answer a variety of questions about political behavior, such as:
- Is political orientation associated with differences in certain brain regions?
- Are there reliable neural biomarkers of political orientation?
- Is political orientation modifiable, and if so, why are some individuals ferociously entrenched to one political dogma while others are able to untether themselves and adopt another political doctrine?
- What are the brain characteristics of “swing voters” who may align themselves with different parties in different election cycles?
- Is there a “religification” of politics among the ardent fanatics who regard the tenets of their political beliefs as “articles of faith?”
- Is the brain modified by certain attributes (such as educational level, age, sex, marital status, race, ethnicity, and religious affiliation) that translate to political decision-making?
- Can neuro-politics explain the sprouting of psychiatric symptoms such as obsessions, anxiety, irritability, anger, hatred, and conspiracy theories?
- Is political extremism driven by cortical structures, limbic structures, or both?
Politics and the brain
Here is a brief review of some studies that examined the relationship of political orientation or voting behavior with brain structure and function:
1. Roger Sperry, the 1981 Nobel Laureate (for his studies on split-brain patients) reported that in patients who underwent callosotomy, both cerebral hemispheres gave the same ratings of politicians when their photos were shown to each hemisphere separately.2
2. A functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study found that the faces of candidates activated participants’ ventromedial and anterior prefrontal cortices. Amygdala activation was associated with the intensity of the emotion.3
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