New Study Shows Liberals Have More Brain Activity

I am not making this up!

Participants were college students whose politics ranged from "very liberal" to "very conservative." Scientists instructed them to tap a keyboard when an M appeared on a computer monitor and to refrain from tapping when they saw a W.

M appeared four times more frequently than W, conditioning participants to press a key in knee-jerk fashion whenever they saw a letter.

The participants were wired to an electroencephalograph that recorded activity in their anterior cingulate cortex, the part of the brain that detects conflicts between a habitual tendency (pressing a key) and a correct response (not pressing the key). Liberals had more brain activity and made fewer mistakes than conservatives when they saw a W, researchers said. Liberals and conservatives were equally accurate in recognizing M.

Researchers obtained the same results when they repeated the experiment in reverse, asking another set of participants to tap when they saw W.

Frank J. Sulloway, a researcher at the Institute of Personality and Social Research, at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the study, said results "provided an elegant demonstration that individual differences on a conservative-liberal dimension are strongly related to brain activity."

Not to worry, though, my conservative friends. One of the researchers was quick to point out that this doesn't necessarily mean liberals are smarter...or does it?

Lead author David Amodio, an assistant professor of psychology at NYU, cautioned that the study looked at a narrow slice of human behavior and that it would be a mistake to conclude that one political orientation was better than another. The tendency of conservatives to block distracting information could be a good thing, depending on the situation, he said.

Because blocking out distracting information that shows there were no WMDs in Iraq, and that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, and being doggedly persistent in their approach to the war has worked out very well for them, hasn't it?