Scientists Scanned the Brains of Authoritarians and Found Something Weird
People who support authoritarianism on either side of the political divide have, according to a new study, something weird going on with their brains.
Published in the journal Neuroscience, new research out of Spain's University of Zaragoza found, upon scanning the brains of 100 young adults, that those who hold authoritarian beliefs had major differences in brain areas associated with social reasoning and emotional regulation from subjects whose politics hewed more to the center.
The University of Zaragoza team recruited 100 young Spaniards — 63 women and 37 men, none of whom had any history of psychiatric disorders — between the ages of 18 and 30. Along with having their brains scanned via magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), the participants were asked questions that help identify both right-wing and left-wing authoritarianism and measure how anxious, impulsive, and emotional they were.
As the researchers defined them, right-wing authoritarians are people who ascribe to conservative ideologies and so-called "traditional values" who advocate for "punitive measures for social control," while left-wing authoritarians are interested in "violently overthrow[ing] and [penalizing] the current structures of authority and power in society."
Though participants whose beliefs align more with authoritarianism on either side of the aisle differed significantly from their less-authoritarian peers, there were also some stark differences between the brain scans of left-wing and right-wing authoritarians in the study.
In an interview with PsyPost, lead study author Jesús Adrián-Ventura said that he and his team found that right-wing authoritarianism was associated with lower grey matter volume in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex — a "region involved in understanding others' thoughts and perspectives," as the assistant Zaragoza psychology professor put it.
The left-wing authoritarians of the bunch — we don't know exactly how many, as the results weren't broken down in the paper — had less cortical (or outer brain layer) thickness in the right anterior insula, which is "associated with emotional empathy and behavioral inhibition." Cortical thickness in that brain region has been the subject of ample research, from a 2005 study that found people who meditate regularly have greater thickness in the right anterior insula to a 2018 study that linked it to greater moral disgust.
The author, who is also part of an interdisciplinary research group called PseudoLab that studies political extremism, added that the psychological questionnaires subjects completed also suggested that "both left-wing and right-wing authoritarians act impulsively in emotionally negative situations, while the former tend to be more anxious."
As the paper notes, this is likely the first study of its kind to look into differences between right- and left-wing authoritarianism rather than just grouping them all together. Still, it's a fascinating look into the brains of people who hold extremist beliefs — especially as their ilk seize power worldwide.
More on authoritarianism: Chinese People Keep Comparing Trump's Authoritarianism to Mao and Xi Jinping
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
'Hidden' breast cancer found in new screening study
A pioneering breast cancer trial involving more than 9,000 patients has found early stages of the disease that might be missed by regular mammograms. Researchers used a range of different scanning methods, including MRI scans and injecting dye into breast tissue, to better understand the disease. More than 1,300 patients in the trial were recruited through Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Trust. Dr Sarah Vinnicombe, the lead breast radiologist and deputy director of screening at the Thirlestaine Breast Centre in Cheltenham, said she and her colleagues had known for a long time that mammography "even though it's a good screening tool for most women, is not perfect". The issue, she told BBC Radio Gloucestershire, comes down to the density of breast tissue. People with denser tissue are at a higher risk of developing cancer, but as breast tissue and cancers both appear white on mammograms, early warning signs can be difficult to pick up. The researchers looked at three different ways of picking up early-stage cancers - a whole-breast ultrasound, a quick form of breast MRI and a type of mammogram in which patients are injected with a dye to highlight abnormal areas. With more than 9,000 women involved overall it was the first study ever to take this approach and, Dr Vinnicombe said, it yielded "fascinating" results. What the researchers found in the group of patients who had the MRI scan or contrast mammogram was a "massive increase in the number of cancers" detected. As for how their findings could impact what women are offered, Dr Vinnicombe said: "There are a lot of conversations going on in the Department of Health and the national screening committee at the moment. "It's a work in progress - it's quite clear that we can't just implement contrast mammography or MRI for all those women in the country who have very dense breasts," she added, as this would amount to around 10% of the 2.2 million women screened each year. However, she added, the research had found that not all women with denser breast tissue were at higher risk - meaning the more effective techniques they had identified could be targeted at a smaller group of women. Follow BBC Gloucestershire on Facebook, X and Instagram. Send your story ideas to us on email or via WhatsApp on 0800 313 4630. New hope for patients with breast cancer gene Call for NHS to give women with dense breasts extra cancer scans Gloucestershire NHS Foundation Trust
Yahoo
6 hours ago
- Yahoo
'Hidden' breast cancer found in new screening study
A pioneering breast cancer trial involving more than 9,000 patients has found early stages of the disease that might be missed by regular mammograms. Researchers used a range of different scanning methods, including MRI scans and injecting dye into breast tissue, to better understand the disease. More than 1,300 patients in the trial were recruited through Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Trust. Dr Sarah Vinnicombe, the lead breast radiologist and deputy director of screening at the Thirlestaine Breast Centre in Cheltenham, said she and her colleagues had known for a long time that mammography "even though it's a good screening tool for most women, is not perfect". The issue, she told BBC Radio Gloucestershire, comes down to the density of breast tissue. People with denser tissue are at a higher risk of developing cancer, but as breast tissue and cancers both appear white on mammograms, early warning signs can be difficult to pick up. The researchers looked at three different ways of picking up early-stage cancers - a whole-breast ultrasound, a quick form of breast MRI and a type of mammogram in which patients are injected with a dye to highlight abnormal areas. With more than 9,000 women involved overall it was the first study ever to take this approach and, Dr Vinnicombe said, it yielded "fascinating" results. What the researchers found in the group of patients who had the MRI scan or contrast mammogram was a "massive increase in the number of cancers" detected. As for how their findings could impact what women are offered, Dr Vinnicombe said: "There are a lot of conversations going on in the Department of Health and the national screening committee at the moment. "It's a work in progress - it's quite clear that we can't just implement contrast mammography or MRI for all those women in the country who have very dense breasts," she added, as this would amount to around 10% of the 2.2 million women screened each year. However, she added, the research had found that not all women with denser breast tissue were at higher risk - meaning the more effective techniques they had identified could be targeted at a smaller group of women. Follow BBC Gloucestershire on Facebook, X and Instagram. Send your story ideas to us on email or via WhatsApp on 0800 313 4630. New hope for patients with breast cancer gene Call for NHS to give women with dense breasts extra cancer scans Gloucestershire NHS Foundation Trust
Forbes
18 hours ago
- Forbes
Hardware, Software, Meet Wetware: A Computer With 800,000 Human Neurons
The Cortical Labs CL1 biological computer with human brain cells. The world's first 'code-deployable' biological computer is now for sale. The Cortical Labs CL1 costs $35,000 and has 800,000 human brain cells living and growing in a nutrient solution on a silicon chip. Computer scientists can deploy computer code directly to these neurons, which have been integrated into a 'biOS' or Biological Intelligence Operating System with what the company says is a mixture of hard silicon and soft tissue. The goal, according to the companies' founder? Smarter AI that drops some of the A and adds more of the I. Maybe, eventually, smarter brains than the ones we currently walk around with. 'The only machine or the only thing that we know of that actually has true intelligence is the brain,' founder and CEO Hon Weng Chong told me when I interviewed him five years ago, while he was still using mice neurons. 'So we said, let's start with the basic building structure, the building blocks being neurons, and let's build our way up and maybe we'll get there along the way.' Our human brains have neurons connected together in hierarchies, and from that emerges intelligence and consciousness, he adds. This approach is similar to neuromorphic computing architectures, which attempt to mimic biological brains with silicon-based hardware, but of course different in that neuromorphic chips do not typically use actual living brain cells. Cortical Labs, based in Australia, says scientists can solve today's most difficult problems with their biological computers, which they say are self-programming and infinitely flexible. A key difference between biological computers and silicon-based chips, of course, is that biological computers last even less time. The neurons that ship with your CL1 will live for 'up to six months,' at which point you'll likely have to invest in a refresh or refurbishment which provides new neurons for continued compute. And yes, biological computers need food and water and nutrients, all of which are supplied onboard via a life-support system the keeps them at optimum temperature. Plus, it filters out waste byproducts of living human cells: the kind of work kidneys might do in a full living organism. A Cortical Labs chip under a high-powered electron microscope. You can see tight connections between ... More neurons and the silicon substrate, the company says. In some ways the CL1 is more like a space ship than a computer, because it's a self-contained life support system that requires few external inputs. A key difference: the need for external power. From the outside, though, you treat the CL1 as a typical computer. You can plug in USB devices, cameras, even actuators if you want your CL1 to control a physical system. (Which, frankly, human neurons are typically pretty good at.) And there's a touchscreen so you can see system status or view live data. Five years ago, Cortical Lab's then-CTO Andy Kitchen told me they were deploying systems with tens of thousands of neurons to hundreds of thousands of neurons, but that their roadmap included 'scaling that up to millions of neurons." Now Cortical Labs sees their biological computers growing to hundreds of millions of cells, and with different technologies, billion or trillion-cell levels. However, there's not a direct one-to-one equivalent with neuromorphic neurons in a silicon-based system, he added. Biological neurons are much more powerful, he says. Interestingly, communicating with physical human neurons in a biological computer is vastly different than writing computer code to an artificial computer. 'The premier way would be to describe your task somehow, probably through some sort of very high-level language, and then we would turn that into a stimulus sequence which would shape biological behavior to fit your specification,' Kitchen told me. Part of the difference is how to encode and communicate the problem, and part of the difference is that the CL1 neurons, like the ones in your brain right now, have some plasticity: they can essentially reprogram themselves for different tasks. Essentially, the neurons learn how to solve your problem, just like you learn how to do new things. You won't likely see CL1 systems in general use anytime soon: currently, the targeted customers are in medical fields like drug discovery and disease modeling, says IEEE Spectrum. There's the added value that scientists can perform experiments on a little synthetic brain as well. If all of this seems on the edge of creepy, or even right over, that's likely because it is. CL1 says they don't do any animal testing, although they did start with mouse neurons, and they say that the human brain cells in their biological computers are lab-grown. But clearly the first human neurons came from somewhere. Cortical Labs says customers have to get 'ethical approval' to general cell lines, and require buyers to have proper facilities to maintain the biological chips. What exactly that means, however, is unclear. Soon we may see physical system in the world, like humanoid robots, with partially organic components to their brains.
