Neuropolitics

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Neuropolitics is a science which investigates the interplay between the brain and politics. It combines work from a variety of scientific fields which includes neuroscience, political science, psychology, behavioral genetics, primatology, and ethology. Often, neuropolitics research borrow methods from cognitive neuroscience to investigate classic questions from political science such as how people make political decisions, form political / ideological attitudes, evaluate political candidates, and interact in political coalitions. However, another line of research considers the role that evolving political competition has had on the development of the brain in humans and other species. The research in neuropolitics often intersects with work in genopolitics, political psychology, political physiology, sociobiology, neuroeconomics, and neurolaw.

Contents

History

Philosophers, including Plato and John Locke, have long theorized about the nature of human thought and used these theories as a basis for their political philosophy. In Locke's view, humans entered the world with a mind that was a blank slate and formed governments as a result of the necessities imposed by the state of nature. Though Locke was trained in medicine, he became skeptical about the value of anatomical studies of the brain and concluded that no useful insights about mental faculties could be developed by studying it. [1]

Roger Sperry and colleagues performed the first published neuropolitics experiment in 1979 with split-brain patients who had their corpus-callosum severed and thus had two brain hemispheres with severely impaired communication. [2] The researchers showed photos of political figures to each of the patients' eyes (and thus each distinct brain hemisphere) separately and asked them to give a "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" evaluation. Both hemispheres were shown to be capable of rendering a political attitude about the people they were viewing. For instance, Adolf Hitler and Fidel Castro were given a thumbs down, while Winston Churchill was given a thumbs up, and Richard Nixon was given a thumb in the neutral position (the experiments were carried out prior to full revelation of the Watergate scandal.) Each hemisphere attempted to communicate clues about the identity of the individuals to the other hemisphere. This study demonstrated that neurological approaches could inform researchers' understanding of political attitudes.

Frans de Waal's first book in 1982, Chimpanzee Politics, [3] suggested that the brains of non-human primates like chimpanzees enabled them to engage in complex and elaborate societal maneuvers. This "Machiavellian intelligence" facilitated the formation of coalitions and political dynamics with many analogues to human politics. Later work by Robin Dunbar suggested a relationship between the size of an animal's neo-cortex and the size of the social group it could successfully manage. While Aristotle's Politics compared the mental faculties of humans to other animals in trying to establish a foundation for understanding human politics, the systematic work of de Waal and Dunbar brought rigorous methods for illuminating the relationship between the brain and politics, even across distantly related species.

Neuroimaging

The advent of functional magnetic resonance imaging gave a new set of tools to neuroscience that could be used to investigate questions that were difficult or impossible to address previously. The first neuropolitics studies using fMRI looked at the differences in brain activity between people who were knowledgeable about national politics and those who were not, while they answered political questions. Following in the tradition of work by Philip Converse and John Zaller, it found that the politically knowledgeable had elevated levels of activity in the default mode network of the brain while political novices had diminished activity in the same areas. [4] [5] A subsequent study by Drew Westen and colleagues confirmed the elevated default mode network activity for political sophisticates and suggested differences between Republicans and Democrats in how they think about political questions. [6] Westen later expanded on his findings and their implications for political campaigns in his book The Political Brain. [7]

David Amodio and colleagues [8] measured event-related potential (ERP) for a set of liberal and conservative participants while they performed a go/no go task and found that greater liberalism was associated with stronger conflict-related anterior cingulate activity. In 2011, Ryota Kanai's group at University College London found differences in the size of particular brain regions corresponded with whether the participants were more liberal or more conservative. [9]

Politics in other species

Despite the risks of anthropomorphizing the behaviors of non-human animals, researchers have investigated the politics of a number of social species. In addition to de Waals' work on chimpanzees, scientists have investigated the dynamics of coalitions in hyenas, dolphins, elephants, and other animals. In the spotted hyena, for instance, social interactions are characterized by a fission-fusion society in which groups of hyenas can form and dissolve on a regular basis. The greater complexity of the political dynamics among the spotted hyena appears to require a larger neocortex than in related species with simpler social structures. [10] Dolphins have been shown to exhibit changing multilevel political alliances that appear to put substantial demands on their social cognition. [11] And, elephants exhibit different coalitional dynamics in the different levels of their societal organization. [12] Considering the relationships among neuroanatomy, mental function, and political dynamics in other species can inform our understanding of the politics in humans and the role that our brain plays in our politics. [13] [14]

See also

Further reading

Related Research Articles

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Broca's area, or the Broca area, is a region in the frontal lobe of the dominant hemisphere, usually the left, of the brain with functions linked to speech production.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis</span>

In primatology, the Machiavellian intelligence or social brain hypothesis describes the capacity of primates to manuever in complex social groups. The first introduction of this concept came from Frans de Waal's book Chimpanzee Politics (1982). In the book de Waal notes that chimpanzees performed certain social maneuvering behaviors that reminded him of the works of Machiavelli.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Behavioral neuroscience</span> Field of study

Behavioral neuroscience, also known as biological psychology, biopsychology, or psychobiology, is the application of the principles of biology to the study of physiological, genetic, and developmental mechanisms of behavior in humans and other animals.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Auditory cortex</span> Part of the temporal lobe of the brain

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Planum temporale</span>

The planum temporale is the cortical area just posterior to the auditory cortex within the Sylvian fissure. It is a triangular region which forms the heart of Wernicke's area, one of the most important functional areas for language. Original studies on this area found that the planum temporale was one of the most asymmetric regions in the brain, with this area being up to ten times larger in the left cerebral hemisphere than the right.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Von Economo neuron</span> Specific class of mammalian cortical neurons

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Affective neuroscience is the study of how the brain processes emotions. This field combines neuroscience with the psychological study of personality, emotion, and mood. The basis of emotions and what emotions are remains an issue of debate within the field of affective neuroscience.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Intraparietal sulcus</span> Sulcus on the lateral surface of the parietal lobe

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Connectome</span> Comprehensive map of neural connections in the brain

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Disgust</span> Basic emotion

Disgust is an emotional response of rejection or revulsion to something potentially contagious or something considered offensive, distasteful or unpleasant. In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Charles Darwin wrote that disgust is a sensation that refers to something revolting. Disgust is experienced primarily in relation to the sense of taste, and secondarily to anything which causes a similar feeling by sense of smell, touch, or vision. Musically sensitive people may even be disgusted by the cacophony of inharmonious sounds. Research has continually proven a relationship between disgust and anxiety disorders such as arachnophobia, blood-injection-injury type phobias, and contamination fear related obsessive–compulsive disorder.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Superior temporal sulcus</span> Part of the brains temporal lobe

In the human brain, the superior temporal sulcus (STS) is the sulcus separating the superior temporal gyrus from the middle temporal gyrus in the temporal lobe of the brain. A sulcus is a deep groove that curves into the largest part of the brain, the cerebrum, and a gyrus is a ridge that curves outward of the cerebrum.

Cultural neuroscience is a field of research that focuses on the interrelation between a human's cultural environment and neurobiological systems. The field particularly incorporates ideas and perspectives from related domains like anthropology, psychology, and cognitive neuroscience to study sociocultural influences on human behaviors. Such impacts on behavior are often measured using various neuroimaging methods, through which cross-cultural variability in neural activity can be examined.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alexander T. Sack</span> German neuroscientist and cognitive psychologist

Alexander T. Sack is a German neuroscientist and cognitive psychologist. He is currently appointed as a full professor and chair of applied cognitive neuroscience at the Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience at Maastricht University. He is also co-founder and board member of the Dutch-Flemish Brain Stimulation Foundation, director of the International Clinical TMS Certification Course, co-director of the Center for Integrative Neuroscience (CIN) and the Scientific Director of the Transcranial Brain Stimulation Policlinic at Maastricht University Medical Centre.

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