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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.
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.
Yeah, everyone always forgets the President is in charge of the budget.
Oh wait, I have that backwards.
Only crack the nuts that crack. You don't put the ones that don't crack in the sack.
Can anyone spot the logical fallacy in the above quoted post from Scott Adams?
No, but I can spot the fallacy in your statement. The first instance of the word "the." ;)
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.
Then let me help you:
Note the confluence of "probably", "unpredictable" and "can change just about anything".
Think about ceilings and floors. Give it a little time, it will come to you.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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 think I said I supported Sanders. I just said that he had a consistent and verifiable voting record. I think that's kind of his charm. He may or may not be a crazy old man, he may or may not have voted for/against your pet issue. But, if he says he's for/against something, he tends to back those words up with his votes. I don't mind tipping my hat to someone like that.
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.)
I gather that you believe America will have more jobs if it just stops trading with other nations. And your state will have more jobs if you just stop trading with the rest of America. And your town will have more jobs if you just stop trading with the rest of the state. In fact, perhaps we should entirely do without commerce. That might work.
You have a valid point, and one that deserves an answer.
In past decades, free trade agreements were sold to the American public as a way to become richer. Economists admitted that wages would stagnate, but pointed out that goods and services from abroad would be much cheaper so that overall we would be richer.
Wages would stagnate, but costs would go down faster than what wages would have risen.
It's now several decades later, manufacturing has moved to Mexico and China and India, wages have indeed stagnated, and there are Chinese dollar stores everywhere.
The problem with this model is that the benefits went mostly to the rich, while the middle class was gutted. We can look at the past couple of decades with perfect hindsight and see income inequality skyrocket while employment tanked.
Keeping jobs local forces the rich to pay more to produce goods, and acts to prevent this inequality. The extra expenses go into the local economy and benefits Americans, instead of benefiting a people in other countries.
In fact, perhaps we should entirely do without commerce. That might work.
Maybe we should outsource all our jobs to other countries. That would work just as well.
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.
Our current President has been impossible to work with, so in return Congress has largely refused to work with him
Bullshit. The Republicans in Congress have opposed practically every goddamn thing he's put forth, starting with "make him a one-term president", to refusing to consider anything he's proposed even when it was something they originally came up with. And now the Republicans won't even consider holding hearings on a Supreme Court nominee, which is their fucking job.
The Republicans shut down the government rather than work with him, or did that little fact slip your memory?
So don't give me this fucking horsecrap about how he's been "impossible to work with", it's just plain bullshit. The obstructionism Obama has received has exceeded anything I've seen in 50+ years of watching our government at work. Form the Birtherism crap to the "he's a Muslim" nonsense, this Congress has been blatantly partisan in the extreme.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
You're very wrong. Look at the graph here, and you'll see current debt as % GDP is below the average for the past 50 years.
Learn the difference between debt and deficit and you won't make that mistake...
We're approaching 20 trillion in debt, that is going to kill us sooner or later...
I'm 12,000 miles away and I've recently heard republican senators say that they would not confirm anybody for SC justice that Obama picked, simply because Obama picked them. That is childish obstructionism and a clear dereliction of duty, Trump is the Frankenstein candidate the republicans created with 20yrs of anti-intellectual rhetoric.He has divided the GOP and in so doing has handed the election to the democrats on a silver platter.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Clinton has pissed in too many cereal bowls, made too many backroom deals. She's damaged goods...
Frankly, the R controlled Congress could work with Sanders better than it could Clinton, he at least is honest about his viewpoints and isn't bought and paid for.
While I disagree with many things Sanders says, I do respect him. Clinton? Nope, she's dog meat as far as I'm concerned, nothing she says means anything because she just lies, lies, and lies.
If she is on the Ticket, then it doesn't matter who the other name is, the ballot might as well say:
[ ] Clinton
[ ] Not-Clinton
If it ended up being Sanders vs. Trump, I'd actually have to give that some thought, because while he is a socialist, Trump is a bit nuts.
Reality is somewhere in between the two of them. Shame we can't toss them in a blender and take the best parts out and throw away the trash of both sides.
Nothing honest about it. He'll lie to your face if it'll improve his polls. He's a showman, and certainly entertaining. His his relationship with the truth is tenuous as best, if not entirely accidental.
This signature is false.
They refuse to hold hearings. Isn't that the minimum due diligence?