Comment on [deleted]

• givesomefucks@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Scientists can tell with like 80% accuracy what the political identity of an American is… just from a brain scan.

  If the prefrontal cortex is larger and more active, that person is likely to be empathetic and use higher reasoning to control their emotion. Those people overwhelmingly vote Dem.

  If the amygdala is larger and more active, then that person is more likely to feel fear or anger and act based on those emotions without thinking.

  Then there’s the 20% where they’re just kind of average and it’s a coin toss.

  That is why a woman can view her individual experience decades ago with an abortion and use that to rationalize not letting any woman get one now.

  She’s not empathetic enough to understand other women may be in a worse spot than she’d have been if she kept.

  She isn’t using the critical thinking to understand decades of medical advancement means it’s a lot safer now.

  But she is still in fear of her bad outcome.

  And she’s still angry she had complications.

  If it doesn’t make sense to you, it’s because you’re brain isn’t working the same as the other side. The tragedy is only one side is usually able to understand it. The other side just keeps ranting about crazy shit because they’re constantly terrified or pissed off about a hypothetical.

  source

  • Nimrod@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Do you have a source for this?

    source

    • driving_crooner@lemmy.eco.br ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Pretty sure is just one of those studies did on an n = 20 us college students by another group of students that has been never replicated.

      source
  • NoIWontPickaName@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Really? You want to try and play that card mr mengele?

    source

    • givesomefucks@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      At no point did I say this was genetic or couldn’t be changed…

      If you weren’t a dick, I probably would have explained that for you.

      Do t think you’d have understood, but I’d have given it a shot.

      source

      • NoIWontPickaName@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Oh I understood you, it was a little difficult with your head shoved so far up your own ass on that pedestal you built for yourself, but i managed.

        source

        • -> View More Comments
  • Erk@cdda.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    This is the kind of factoid you shouldn’t spread unless you’re prepared to back it up with a lot of hard data and sources, since you’re essentially arguing biological superiority over your opponents. Very little comes from that

    source

    • givesomefucks@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I already have…

      nbcnews.com/…/study-brain-scans-reveal-your-polit…

      And it’s not biological, the brain changes even through adulthood.

      But my comment is already long enough, it’s not my fault most people don’t understand how brains work, but I bet I can guess the political leaning of all the people who just got mad and replied before scrolling down.

      source

      • Erk@cdda.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        This is a very odd comment.

        1. I’m not sure how my comment could possibly have been any more calm. I’m just cautioning on sharing that specific type of information without a source handy.
        2. You had not posted sources when I left my comment. I cannot predict what you’ll post before you post it.
        3. Brains are part of biology. Biology does not mean “unchanging”, I’m very familiar with neuroplasticity.
        4. I’m a card carrying socialist. Wrote the card myself. I’m also a doctor and don’t like seeing pop science shared uncritically as a way to imply biological superiority over my opponents, because it doesn’t help my cause in any way.

        For someone attacking me for perceived anger, I feel like you could take some of your own advice re. counting to ten before posting.

        source
  • astraeus@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    The source article is a small research article sampling young adults who were students in college. The article itself addresses the scope of its findings aptly:

    Although these results suggest a link between political attitudes and brain structure, it is important to note that the neural processes implicated are likely to reflect complex processes of the formation of political attitudes rather than a direct representation of political opinions per se. The conceptualizing and reasoning associated with the expression of political opinions is not necessarily limited to structures or functions of the regions we identified but will require the involvement of more widespread brain regions implicated in abstract thoughts and reasoning.

    We speculate that the association of gray matter volume of the amygdala and anterior cingulate cortex with political attitudes that we observed may reflect emotional and cognitive traits of individuals that influence their inclination to certain political orientations.

    I don’t think it is a good idea to base your opinion of political bias and brain chemistry on a single article’s speculation.

    source

    • astraeus@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      This is the foundation for the research article listed in the March 2013 NBC article.

      Fourth paragraph of introduction starts:

      The discovery by Kanai and colleagues [15] that four brain regions implicated in risk and uncertainty (the right amygdala, left insula, right entorhinal cortex, and anterior cingulate (ACC)) differed in liberals and conservatives provided further evidence that political ideology might be connected to differences in cognitive processes.

      Same paragraph concludes:

      The ACC is involved in conflict and error monitoring and in action selection [21], [22]. Thus, the regions implicated in risk and conflict, cognitive processes during which liberals and conservatives have been shown to differ in physiological response, are the similar regions shown by Kanai et al. to differ structurally in liberals and conservatives. If patterns of brain activity in these regions during the evaluation of risks could dependably differentiate liberals and conservatives, then we would have further evidence of the link between mental processes and political preferences.

      Conclusion of the introduction:

      Previous studies [26]–[28] using this risk-taking decision-making task found activity in some of the same regions identified by Kanai et al. as differentiating liberals and conservatives.

      Honestly, I think their finding is more accurately conveyed with this sample:

      Although genetic variation has been shown to contribute to variation in political ideology [48] and strength of partisanship [53], the portion of the variance in political affiliation explained by activity in the amygdala and insula is significantly larger (see Appendix S1), suggesting that acting as a partisan in a partisan environment may alter the brain, above and beyond the effect of the heredity.

      The argument here is not so much that brain chemistry predicts political bias, but rather that political bias can influence brain chemistry.

      source

      • givesomefucks@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        I shouldn’t be surprised all these people couldn’t keep their emotion in check for the 2 minutes to check if someone else already tried an excuse before scrolling down and seeing that someone else already tried an excuse and it failed…

        But I still am.

        Everytime I’ve ever brought this up, it pisses off a lot of people who don’t even try to explain it.

        Hint: I already told people there’s a decade of follow up studies.

        source
• captainlezbian@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  That’s absolutely a thing. It’s partly because nobody listens to “1% will have a complication” because it’s so small and it’s probably going to be nothing, and outside of a handful of procedures it’s not really gone into depth. But when you’re that 1% and it’s bad it’s hard to acknowledge that the gamble was probably a good bet actually or at the very least it could’ve been and you made the choice. It’s especially rough when like abortion neither option has a high risk of serious complications, but the active choice is less risky. That one’s kinda rough on our neurological risk processing

  source