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How Your Brain Figures Out What It Doesn't Know
hex0D passes along an article at NPR about a study that examined the biology behind the self-assessment of knowledge. Quoting:
"We isolated a region of the prefrontal cortex, which is right at the front of the brain and is thought to be involved in high-level thought, conscious planning, monitoring of our ongoing brain activity,' Fleming says. In people who were good at assessing their own level of certainty, that region had more gray matter and more connections to other parts of the brain, according to the study Fleming and his colleagues published in the journal Science."
Why? So they could see that people who vote based on a political party color have less development in those areas than people who make their vote by putting the effort into figuring out which politician will most likely do what they want regardless of political party or promises?
Its cute that you wanted to make it political, but the very fact that you bring up 'party' shows you're an idiot.
Vote for the guy who's going to do what you think is right, not because the guy flies your favorite color or animal.
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The problem though is that independents aren't necessarily any smarter than partisans, they're just not influenced by the same things.
Republicans have run for quite a while of FUD, tax cuts for the rich and corporatism. Whereas Democrats have run more on emotions and notion that things ought to be more just and that we can do better than what we're currently achieving.
Independents OTOH are tougher in many ways to pin down as some of them think that the party on their side isn't extreme enough, some want something completely different and then some are just unpredictable morons.
It's odd sometimes how gut feeling and instinct end up being correct.
Nope. Confirmation bias is perfectly normal.
"Do you know you have more nerve endings in your stomach than in your head? Look it up. Now somebody's gonna say, "I did look that up and it's wrong." Well mister, that's cause you looked it up in a book. Next time, try looking it up in your gut. I did. And my gut tells me that's how our nervous system works."
There aint no pancake so thin it doesn't have two sides.
Let me guess: You are for the Democrats, right?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Or they find the infinitesimal unconvincing and so when they look at their own finite knowledge divided by the infinite knowledge they don't have, they get 0.
They've already done brain-scans on people with political affinities. Those who are right-wing show under-developed regions dealing with emotion, those on the left-wing show similar defects in other areas of the brain.
I've seen some half-baked studies making similar claims that, curiously, always echo popular stereotypes. This stuff really isn't any better science than the hoary old studies measuring skull sizes of African-Americans. The biggest problem with any of them is determining what someone's orientation really is. Most people, nominally left or right, have poorly constructed views on a mess of issues, a tribal identity, and a fair amount of political paranoia. They are generally all over the map, and often don't realize their beliefs are contradictory. Honest to god partisans, who have independently developed their views and ideology, are a pretty small percentage of the population, mostly because there's so little economic benefit to doing so.
I'd like to say politicians have no brain, but politicians fit into the same category as CEOs and CEOs are well-established as schizophrenic sociopaths and politicians will likely therefore exhibit brain damage accordingly.
I'm calling bullshit on this. People need to believe in the devil, and in a secular society they substitute powerful figures for it. Politicians and CEOs and such ride the wave, for the most part, and have little actual control over anything outside a narrow domain. In other words, bad things happen because people, generally, are bad, not because there is some unaccountable elite scheming behind the scenes.
I find few powerful figures whose controversial actions aren't (eventually) explainable by a. them having superior knowledge of their domain than I have or b. them being poor leaders and surrounded by yes-men. B is a big one, never underestimate the Peter Principle.
All political persuasions, by definition, operate on the theory that ideology comes before consequences, so all political persuasions can be considered neurological diseases.
Nope, American conservatism operates on precisely the opposite theory. As Buckley put it, "don't immanentize the eschaton", meaning, don't try to bring about the end times or a utopia. The whole notion is that you can't have a perfect world, you don't even consider a perfect world in what you're trying to achieve. You have to work with what you've got, and you have to realize that their lives and dreams are valuable in and of themselves, and temper any changes you might try to achieve with the realization that your ends are not necessarily any greater than what they have now. The more thoroughly conservative a person is, the more consequences are everything, the ideology is nothing.
Libertarians, Tea Party loonies and other fanatics are worsening the situation by devolution.
Progressivism has always, in all of its incarnations, had reasons for why the right-thinking adherents to the movement were smarter, wiser, better human beings, and why people who disagreed were mentally defective, overwhelmed by hate, or even subhuman. The most depressing development lately is that as more women are taking leadership positions in the conservative movement, we now have liberals deriding them as insane or sexually damaged. Modern American progressivism started with women's suffrage, and has now come full circle to attack them in the most vicious, misogynistic ways.
The ability to introspect about self-performance is key to human subjective experience, but the neuroanatomical basis of this ability is unknown
Error correction is important; but we're not sure where the EC functionality is on this board.
Such accurate introspection requires discriminating correct decisions from incorrect ones,
Let's parrot the definition of EC in pretentious sounding verbiage so we'll look more important.
a capacity that varies substantially across individuals
Some of the EC chips are better than others.
We dissociated variation in introspective ability from objective performance in a simple perceptual-decision task, allowing us to determine whether this interindividual variability was associated with a distinct neural basis.
We ran the bogomips benchmark while some logic probes were placed in strategic locations.
We show that introspective ability is correlated with gray matter volume in the anterior prefrontal cortex, a region that shows marked evolutionary development in humans
We found some interesting signals on pin 3A of the 3rd chip from the CPU. By the way, did I mention that the Homo Sapiens model rocks? That's us. We RULE!
Moreover, interindividual variation in introspective ability is also correlated with white-matter microstructure connected with this area of the prefrontal cortex. Our findings point to a focal neuroanatomical substrate for introspective ability, a substrate distinct from that supporting primary perception
We're pretty sure that the ATMEL 5344-C with the glob of thermal goo performs some of this functionality on the system too. It looks like EC functionality is done on a couple of separate chips.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Yeah, most of those studies are jokes and border on college classroom exercises. However,
most partisans responded using the emotional, and not the reasoning, parts of their brains
is almost just common sense. Just sit back and think about the people you know and their political affiliations, and observe their tendencies in critical thinking discussions (in general). It doesn't take a study to figure this one out.
the idea that any high minded or even marginally abstract ideal drives conservatism dies seconds after entering any room with more than 2 people who identify as conservative in it. beyond "taxes are bad" and "regulation is bad" there is no unifying principle. Jim DeMint just said at a rally that you can't be a fiscal conservative without being a social conservative... an amazingly ridiculous statement. And he's one of the most powerful "conservatives" in this country today. Tell me what Sarah Palin's ideology is other than "make sarah palin rich and powerful"? "Bring more God"?
some idea that conservatives are against 'change' is also badly outdated. They want change. They want the whole country to change to be like them, to the point of making it illegal to be anything else. That's a huge change, they just don't understand it, because they think everyone in america except a 'minority' are like them. Or, should be.
Progressives are not right about everything, never have been. But on civil rights they have always been on the right side. And that makes them morally superior to anything conservatism has to offer. Allowing people you think are wrong to have the freedom to live their ideals while you live yours is basic morality 101. But that doesn't mean that thinking that it's legal to be a conservative, and should be, equals thinking that conservatism is smart, or equal in its "right ness". I can respect your rights while having no respect whatsoever for your point of view.
Calling woman conservative leaders "insane" is thus totally fair game; palin and O'Donnel are definitely a few cards short of a deck. attacking them on the basis of gender roles, appearance or sexuality is not. Sadly, that does happen. Just like it's been happening to liberal female politicians for decades. See, it's not new, it just took this long for conservatives to let their women run for office to see what happens when the "masses" get to have their say.