Is "Left" Vs. "Right" Hard-coded Into Your Brain?

Posted by Unknown on Monday February 18, 2013 @05:08PM from the you-are-a-machine dept.

New submitter kyjellyfish writes "Research published in the journal PLOS ONE, suggests that your parents 'Left or 'Right' party affiliations are not the only factor at work shaping a person's political identity. Differences in opinion between 'Lefties' and 'Righties' may reflect specific physiological processes. In research performed over 10 years ago, brain scans showed that London cab drivers' gray matter grew larger to help them store a mental map of the city." From the article: "Other scans have shown that brain regions associated with risk and uncertainty, such as the fear-processing amygdala, differ in structure in liberals and conservatives. And different architecture means different behavior. Liberals tend to seek out novelty and uncertainty, while conservatives exhibit strong changes in attitude to threatening situations. The former are more willing to accept risk, while the latter tends to have more intense physical reactions to threatening stimuli."

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Re:So what the article is saying... by Kupfernigk · 2013-02-18 22:50 · Score: -1, Redundant

I encourage spiders. They keep the flies under control without pesticides. The most right wing person I ever encountered was terrified even of quite small spiders. It was just as well his wife wouldn't let him keep guns, he'd have tried to take a money spider out with a 12-bore.

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From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."