Latest news with #LeorZmigrod
Time of India
30-05-2025
- Science
- Time of India
Do our brains shape our political views?
Fascinating research on neuroscience of ideology Ideological extremism is usually explained by social, economic and demographic factors. There's not enough research on how individual thinking patterns can make some people more likely to support violence in defense of their beliefs or group. That's what Leor Zmigrod dives into in The Ideological Brain: A Radical Science of Susceptible Minds. Does ideology shape our brains, or do our brains shape ideological leanings? Is there a neuroscience of free will, could extreme worldviews be rooted in cognition and biology? It all depends on how sharp the brief is. What's being studied? Political identities or radicalisation or religion? Is the research on brain areas that do the decision-making, or regions for emotional processing? Is focus on brain structure, or on brain function? Is there a 'how' in the mix, finding a mechanism, or is it simply a search for an effect? The book asks as many questions as it answers as it threads together neuro-research, politics and philosophy to also shine a light on the scope of future research. Zmigrod and political neuroscientists like her are asking how deeply into our brain can ideological systems penetrate. 'How far into the mind and body indoctrination really goes.' Experiments included mapping neural/brain activity and the region where it was happening when participants were exposed to political videos, news etc. Obedient actions evoked brain patterns different from free choices. A 2011 study that compared sizes of liberal and conservative brains found more conservative people had a larger right amygdala than political liberals. Amygdalae are twin brain bits that store emotional 'feels' of negative emotions such as threat, fear & disgust, and information we internalise on social hierarchies. A brain part's size is linked to its processing capacity, but the degree to which anatomy responds to or depends on function is still under study. Enter the chicken-'n-egg puzzle. Do individuals lean towards more conservative ideologies because they have larger amygdalae or does being immersed in 'system-justifying ideologies' – status quo – and conservatism lead to structural brain changes? But, aha, size doesn't matter, says the book. Two sets of scientists found that liberal participants had a larger ACC – a central sausage-shaped thingamajig incharge of emotional processing and cognitive control – but couldn't replicate the results in later tests. Zmigrod argues it's not the size, but function that matters. When it comes to ideological thinking, ACC is 'haughtily aware of its own importance'. The queen is the prefrontal cortex (PFC) – that deals with complex decision-making and high-flying mental computations. More the damage or injury to PFC, more conservative the person. Those with a damaged PFC would identify extreme statements as moderate. Those with intact PFC would spot extreme for what it is. So, to be progressive, all you need is an undamaged PFC? 'Not so fast,' says Zmigrod. Because PFC's like a transport hub making sense of all the info zigging in and zagging out to and from all parts of the brain – it's never a standalone. And then there's dopamine. Most rigid individuals have specific genes that impact how and where dopamine is distributed through the brain – less in PFC, more in parts that control instinct. These pathways can be traced to discover the neurochemistry of ideology. Summing up: The book says, greater the uncertainty, the more susceptible the brain is to dogmatism. Most leaders are creating ever-new uncertainties. What's that doing to people? Facebook Twitter Linkedin Email Disclaimer Views expressed above are the author's own.
The Citizen
23-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Citizen
World Book Day: Best new book releases to add to your reading list
There's a new book waiting for you! This World Book Day, with the theme 'Read Your Way,' readers are invited not only to pick up a new book but also to open their minds in the process. As highlighted by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), this theme encourages individuals, especially children, to embrace the joy of reading by choosing books that resonate with them. Whether you're curious about how the brain works, looking for business inspiration, or seeking a recipe that brings comfort, there's a new book waiting for you. These fresh reads have something for everyone. ALSO READ: Jo Watson's the Queen of steam books Best new book releases to add to your reading list The Ideological Brain by Dr Leor Zmigrod This book delves into the neuroscience of belief systems and radicalisation. Dr Leor Zmigrod, a Cambridge-trained academic dubbed a trailblazer in 'political neuroscience', uses her research to explore how ideologies shape not just opinions, but our very brain structures. Based on over 30 peer-reviewed studies, Dr Zmigrod shows how rigid thinking contributes to extreme ideologies. She encourages readers to avoid fixed beliefs and be open-minded in today's divided world. This book urges readers to think carefully about how beliefs are formed and how they can be changed. Entrepreneurship is Not for Everyone! Is It for You? by Lerato Bodibe Serial entrepreneur and tech innovator, Lerato Bodibe, will release his first book, Entrepreneurship is Not for Everyone!, this May. The book offers a candid look at what it really takes to build a business in today's world. Drawing from his own experiences, from growing up in QwaQwa to starting ROCVEST and the fintech platform ScheduPay, Bodibe shares valuable insights into the entrepreneurial journey. The book also reflects his passion for helping South African youth. His foundation recently supported a young golfer from Welkom, covering school fees and providing equipment, showing his belief that with the right help, anything is possible. Food Trail South Africa by Warren Mendes In Food Trail South Africa, chef Warren Mendes takes readers on a tasty journey across the country. The cookbook, based on his travel series, features a mix of traditional recipes and new twists, gathered from markets, kitchens, and communities. With training from Le Cordon Bleu and experience co-producing the Australian TV series, Mendes encourages home cooks to explore South African food and proudly recreate these dishes at home. I Am Lovely and Dark by Ntombi Meso On World Book Day, 23 April 2025, multi-award-winning broadcaster and DJ Ntombi Meso makes her debut as an author with I Am Lovely and Dark, a children's book about self-love and identity. The story follows Kayise, a young girl learning to embrace her dark skin. Through Kayise's journey, Meso shares an empowering message about self-worth in a world where diverse representation in children's books is still limited. NOW READ: 'It's time I shared my full capabilities': Dineo Ranaka to launch a new talk show
New York Times
08-04-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Ideology May Not Be What You Think but How You're Wired
So sharp are partisan divisions these days that it can seem as if people are experiencing entirely different realities. Maybe they actually are, according to Leor Zmigrod, a neuroscientist and political psychologist at Cambridge University. In a new book, 'The Ideological Brain: The Radical Science of Flexible Thinking,' Dr. Zmigrod explores the emerging evidence that brain physiology and biology help explain not just why people are prone to ideology but how they perceive and share information. This conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity. What is ideology? It's a narrative about how the world works and how it should work. This potentially could be the social world or the natural world. But it's not just a story: It has really rigid prescriptions for how we should think, how we should act, how we should interact with other people. An ideology condemns any deviation from its prescribed rules. You write that rigid thinking can be tempting. Why is that? Ideologies satisfy the need to try to understand the world, to explain it. And they satisfy our need for connection, for community, for just a sense that we belong to something. There's also a resource question. Exploring the world is really cognitively expensive, and just exploiting known patterns and rules can seem to be the most efficient strategy. Also, many people argue — and many ideologies will try to tell you — that adhering to rules is the only good way to live and to live morally. I actually come at it from a different perspective: Ideologies numb our direct experience of the world. They narrow our capacity to adapt to the world, to understand evidence, to distinguish between credible evidence and not credible evidence. Ideologies are rarely, if ever, good. Q: In the book, you describe research showing that ideological thinkers can be less reliable narrators. Can you explain? Remarkably, we can observe this effect in children. In the 1940s, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, interviewed hundreds of children and tested their levels of prejudice and authoritarianism, like whether they championed conformity and obedience or play and imagination. When children were told a story about new pupils at a fictional school and asked to recount the story later, there were significant differences in what the most prejudiced children remembered, as opposed to the most liberal children. Liberal children tended to recall more accurately the ratio of desirable and undesirable traits in the characters of the story; their memories possessed greater fidelity to the story as it was originally told. In contrast, children who scored highly on prejudice strayed from the story; they highlighted or invented undesirable traits for the characters from ethnic minority backgrounds. So, the memories of the most ideologically-minded children incorporated fictions that confirmed their pre-existing biases. At the same time, there was also a tendency to occasionally parrot single phrases and details, rigidly mimicking the storyteller. Are people who are prone to ideology taking in less information? Are they processing it differently? The people most prone to ideological thinking tend to resist change or nuance of any kind. We can test this with visual and linguistic puzzles. For instance, in one test, we ask them to sort playing cards by various rules, like suit or color. But suddenly they apply the rule and it doesn't work. That's because, unbeknownst to them, we changed the rule. The people who tend to resist ideological thinking are adaptable, and so when there's evidence the rules have changed, they change their behavior. Ideological thinkers, when they encounter the change, they resist it. They try to apply the old rule even though it doesn't work anymore. In one study you conducted, you found that ideologues and nonideologues appear to have fundamental differences in their brains' reward circuitry. Can you describe your findings? In my experiments I've found that the most rigid thinkers have genetic dispositions related to how dopamine is distributed in their brains. Rigid thinkers tend to have lower levels of dopamine in their prefrontal cortex and higher levels of dopamine in their striatum, a key midbrain structure in our reward system that controls our rapid instincts. So our psychological vulnerabilities to rigid ideologies may be grounded in biological differences. In fact, we find that people with different ideologies have differences in the physical structure and function of their brains. This is especially pronounced in brain networks responsible for reward, emotion processing, and monitoring when we make errors. For instance, the size of our amygdala — the almond-shaped structure that governs the processing of emotions, especially negatively tinged emotions such as fear, anger, disgust, danger and threat — is linked to whether we hold more conservative ideologies that justify traditions and the status quo. What do you make of this? Some scientists have interpreted these findings as reflecting a natural affinity between the function of the amygdala and the function of conservative ideologies. Both revolve around vigilant reactions to threats and the fear of being overpowered. But why is the amygdala larger in conservatives? Do people with a larger amygdala gravitate toward more conservative ideologies because their amygdala is already structured in a way that is more receptive to the negative emotions that conservatism elicits? Or can immersion in a certain ideology alter our emotional biochemistry in a way that leads to structural brain changes? The ambiguity around these results reflects a chicken-and-egg problem: Do our brains determine our politics, or can ideologies change our brains? If we're wired a certain way, can we change? You have agency to choose how passionately you adopt these ideologies or what you reject or what you don't. I think we all can shift in terms of our flexibility. It's obviously harder for people who have genetic or biological vulnerabilities toward rigid thinking, but that doesn't mean that it's predetermined or impossible to change.
