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Researcher Measures Brain Reactions To Donald Trump (cnn.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Sam Barnett "has been strapping electrode caps on focus group participants and showing them primary season debates," reports CNN, and there's one clear conclusion. "Seeing Trumps face, hearing Trump's voice, lights up the brain." His data captured big surges in neural activity for hot-button topics like immigration, and revealed that while Marco Rubio actually triggered slightly more brain activity among men, Trump clearly produced the highest reactions among women and overall. "The focus group participants might have been excited by Trump. Or they might have been repulsed," reports CNN. "But one thing was for sure: they weren't bored." Barnett has also used electroencephalography (or EEG) to study advertising, and in the future he hopes to also apply it to other complex forms of brain stimulation like movies and even hedge-fund investing.
Not to see if Trump is lying, that's a given :-), but if you are
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Tired of this shit. Human beings have the capacity to flat out ignore their 'brain impulses'. We are not binary creatures with on/off switches. So fucking stupid. :/ If this is the best young science has it should definitely consider another line of work.
This is your brain on Trump.
I'm surprised there wasn't more information about your brain on Cruz. Or maybe it scared the researchers a little too much.
It's politically neutral - just the brain reacting to the orange light.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
"The focus group participants might have been excited by Trump. Or they might have been repulsed,"
My guess is both. Trump brings out the "Watch the world burn" in all of us. Morbid curiosity is a very strong motivator.
All those anti trump people have yet to offer one single alternative to trump.
'He's a nazi we hate him!'
Ok. what's you're suggestion?
'He's a nazi and we hate him!'
You're really not helping...
Bottom line is... Clinton is one evil bitch for sale to the highest bidder. Sanders doesn't stand a chance anymore. And cruz is a grade A jesus freak
So unless you want 4/8 more years of the same ol shit. Trump is it. And he's going to win.
Reality tv? fuck that we have reality politics! gonna be entertaining.
They also determined that exposure to trum causes the same reactions in nematodes.
Therefore it is easy to extrapolate Trump supporters are on evolutionary and intellectual scale as common nematodes.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Look around you, the world already burns. Meanwhile the Democratic answer to the fire is to toss another old log on and let it burn as it has.
The Republicans mostly hate Trump because they too don't mind the fire as it is, worming those rich enough to stay outside of it. Trump however is like tossing a mysterious pressurized can into the fire, which may well douse the fire but at least it will make sure everyone feels the burn.
The Democrats hate Sanders for the same reason but they have him on a much tighter leash with zero chance to displace Clinton as the candidate, no matter how many wish it were so.
It's not curiosity that drives Trump and Sanders numbers; it is a survival instinct. There are lots of people who would vote for either even though that would seem to make no sense if all you can see is through the hoary old bifocals of "Republican" or "Democrat".
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Instead of reporting actual news, networks like CNN (and I guess Slashdot) report content-free bullshit like this all the time. Someone must have been in danger of actually thinking about how government works, and this story came just in time to prevent that. Thinking averted, personal biases confirmed based on nothing, crisis averted just in time, remember to wash your clothes in Tide or whatever the hell CNN is selling you today.
You're FIRED!
Tell me with a straight face you want even four years with this robot at the helm of the country. You do know the Clinton foundation makes money from arms dealers too right? Why do you think she started a needless war in Libya? At least Bush had some motive of saving someone, not just pure profit.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I conduct research in a lab that uses EEG to measure a very different kind of processing, so it's possible I'm unaware of the relevant background literature (if indeed there is any), but the most charitable thing I can say is that it is impossible to draw any conclusions at all from the results as they are reported here.
Barnett talks about "neural engagement", but this is not a technical term. Googling around led to his patent on measuring so-called engagement. The relevant part is as follows:
“For example, if a movie was presented to a group of people, the measure of engagement could show the level of engagement the group (or a subset of the group) displayed in response to different scenes in the movie; the measure of engagement could also show how engaging the movie was overall. The method 100 preferably performs cross-brain correlations of neural data, calculated across pairs (a measure of neural similarity), as input for the measure of engagement. The method 100 additionally may function to provide a measure of engagement across small and precise time ranges. Understanding that one characteristic of engaging content is its ability to generate similar neural responses in different individuals, this preferably enables the method 100 to operate without the need to specify a model for the neural processes of engagement.”
So as far as I can tell, the fact that Trump generated higher levels of engagement means the EEG responses he elicited in viewers were more correlated with each other than were the EEG responses elicited by other candidates. This could potentially be interesting, but not without a process model explaining why. Even taking this associative, non-experimental method at face value, here's a plausible hypothesis that would render this result totally uninteresting: Everyone has seen and heard Donald Trump a lot. The same cannot be said for, say, John Kasich. It seems reasonable to me that frequent stimuli would be more likely to elicit common responses.
Maybe this hypothesis is correct; maybe it's not. The point is that without doing the hard work of showing they understand what their analytic technique measures, the results are totally uninterpretable. You can't even say that "Viewers weren't bored" without knowing what the correlations between the EEG responses of bored people would generate!
tl;dr: A poorly-designed and as-yet unpublished EEG study leads to an uninterpretable result that generated news coverage because readers like it when their latent beliefs are covered with a veneer of scientific acceptability.
(Professional quibble with the write-up: The term "lights up the brain" is neuroscientific slang used exclusively with methods like fMRI that tell you which regions of the brain are active. I know no neuroscientist who would say the brain is "lit up" based on an EEG reading.)
I don't know if it's fair to compare Trump and Sanders. Sanders has a pretty solid, decades old voting record that gives a pretty clear picture of where he stands.
Sanders voted to increase H1B visas at the last round of voting.
How can you support Sanders when he doesn't care whether you (and in the future, your children) have jobs?
This all assumes increased debt is the worst thing which could happen to the economy. It isn't, not by a long shot.
The United States has a net worth of about $124 trillion in 2014 (source). The total federal deficit is about $19 trillion and the federal deficit is $500 billion. But the total US net worth grows by far more than $500 billion per year, so it is very misleading to say the deficit is a large problem. For instance, the total net worth of US households and non-profits grew by $10 trillion in 2014 alone. If I am going $5000 in debt each year, but my total net worth is growing by $10,000 each year, I am still in a pretty good position.
The risk of damaging the economy with drastic measures is far more dangerous than going a few trillion more in debt. Current federal debt levels are really not that bad when put into perspective, although understandably it is very hard for people to put $500 billion in perspective. But to make it easier, the US is a household with a $248,000 house with $38,000 left on their mortgage, and a family budget losing about $100 per month. That is not a dire situation.
If what you're saying is true, we could eliminate the federal income tax *entirely* and simply go into debt each year for the federal budget.
That's what you're saying, yes? If the federal budget is $3.5 trillion, and we're increasing our national value by $10 trillion a year, then we're still coming out ahead, right?
This would be even better than your analogy of going into debt by $5K while increasing in value by $10K each year.
Why don't we do that then?
Howcome we don't simply eliminate income taxes(*)?
(A rhetorical question to illustrate just how ridiculous your explanation is. It doesn't hold up when taken to its logical conclusion.)
Another excerpt from Scott Adams' blog
According to social media, and the mainstream media as well, Trump might be the next Hitler because he does things Hitler would have done. For example:
Trump is charismatic and appeals to our prejudices.
Trump approves of violence against people he thinks deserve it.
Trump blames “others” for the nation’s problems.
Trump has an authoritarian vibe.
All that is true. But it would be equally easy to build a list of why Trump is definitely NOT like Hitler. For example:
Trump is anti-war. Hitler, not so much.
Trump asks us to favor legal citizens over non-citizens. He makes no mention of race. Hitler killed his own citizens and mostly cared about race.
Trump wants citizens to be heavily armed to protect themselves against bad people, including dictators. Hitler didn’t want to arm his potential enemies.
Trump wants greater freedom of speech that would include politically incorrect topics. Hitler wasn’t so big on free speech for others.
Trump assures us his genitalia have “no problem.” Hitler had one testicle.
I really like reading Scott Adams' blog. Unlike most analysis on the planet, he seems to address the issues in a logical, well-reasoned fashion.
and quite probably get us all killed in a nuclear war within 2 years?
You mean of course the nuclear war with Iran that Obama has personally made sure will occur.
Whoever the next president is has nothing to do with the fact America and/or Europe will be hit with nuclear weapons in the next few years.
Hell I'd vote for C'thu'lu over Trump.
So sad to see a handful of otherwise intelligent people so utterly fail to understand what Trump is about and in so doing basically have the opposite impact of trying to stop him they intend.
The funny thing is that you and your ideological looney pals facilitate his rise with stupid proclamations like that, because the people that hate Trump just sound insane and make Trump sound quite reasonable by comparison - because there is nothing so over the top Trump can say that is not beat by an order of magnitude from his haters, who ignore what Trump has actually done in life.
I'm not evener Trump - but I see that the people against Trump are utterly insane and can't seem to understand what he's saying or what he wants to do.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
CNN isn't worth your time. All they talk about is garbage like this and who said the most ridiculous thing today. CNN is willing and able to bait and troll the public with nonsensical questions like did Trump sieg heil before cutting to commercial.
Is Anderson cooper a space alien? Is Jake Taper a Russian spy? Does Wolf Blitzer rape goats? All this and more after these messages.
Apparently they can't be bothered to do any serious investigative journalism on any of the candidates running for office, provide any context or insights into political issues or even bother to explore candidates positions. It is 24x7 talking points and low information bullshit spewed from CNN's cast of lazy idiots.
He promises to shut Mexican and Muslim immigrants out and send all the illegal immigrants home.
Source please. He stated that the Mexican wall should have doors where lawful people can walk through. I have not seen or heard anything about denying access to Mexicans if they obey all laws/rules/regulations. In fact if you pay attention he makes it very clear that he considers legal and illegal entry two very different things and he is only bashing the illegal entries from Mexico.
You are right about the Muslims and illegal immigrants though.
EEG indistinguishable from brain death.
Seastead this.
That's not "mental stimulation", that's laughter.
Table-ized A.I.
Didn't we learn our lesson last cycle? Or the two before that?
Look, there's only three factions that read this site. Socialists, Libertarians, and people that believe their pets talk to them telepathically.
Why bother discussing anything political here?
This never ends well.
This signature has Super Cow Powers
... why didn't they monitor the gag reflex?
http://www.huffingtonpost.in/2016/03/28/the-hate-speech-study-say_n_9556836.html
Casteism
Possibly politically neutral, yet it does speak to an alarming notion: there are voting adults that are unable to accurately interpret that reaction in their brains; often mistaking it for a positive thing. Drug addicts have similar experiences with dope; they think it is good for them. And, even though many drug addicts have an awareness that it is not good, they still continue to participate. And Trump keeps getting votes!
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.
The Post is exactly on topic you censors.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.