But Mr Firth has also been dabbling in neuroscience this year. In April, he was coauthor of a neuroscience paper entitled 'Political orientations are correlated with brain structure in young adults' that was published in Current Biology.
In reality, Mr Firth did little of the actual research for the article, but was one the driving forces behind the project after he commissioned the study whilst appearing on BBC Radio 4.
In the article, the authors used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI; a type of brain scan) to analyse the brain size of people with different political inclinations. They found that people who vote for liberal parties and people who vote for conservative parties show differences in the size of some of their brain regions.
More specifically, liberal people had a greater volume of gray matter in the anterior cingulate cortex (shown above) whereas conservatives had more gray matter in the amygdala. Both of these regions are involved in the cognition of emotion and may be reflective of the different levels of empathy and fear that go into the decision-making process during voting.
This is all well and good, but it doesn't alter the fact that a Hollywood actor finds it easier to get published than someone who has been in research for 3 years. I am not bitter. Honestly. I'm sure that once I am an established neuroscientist, I'll find it just as easy to break into Hollywood, won't I?
See: Political orientations are correlated with brain structure in young adults (Kanai et al., 2011. Current Biology)
See: Political orientations are correlated with brain structure in young adults (Kanai et al., 2011. Current Biology)
I look forward to reading Colin's thoughts on the matter!
ReplyDeleteGood 'brain scans show that...' piece here:
http://deevybee.blogspot.com/2011/06/brain-scans-show-that.html
Agree with the 'brain scan shows that...' piece entirely. In fairness though, this paper conceded (as you would expect a Geraint Rees paper to do) that one cannot assert that there is a causal link between the observed phenomenon and the behaviour.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I was very careful to say 'and MAY be reflective.' The regions in question have already been implicated in processes that may be involved in determining political inclination and also in processes that probably aren't. I would argue that the author is just trying to contextualise the finding in this case.
However, I will not deny that I have fallen wilfully into the trap of over-sexing brain scan data. But come on, I'm only 3 blogs in; I need the followers!
Having now read Firth's (alright, Rees') paper I agree that they interpreted their data very carefully. Unlike some... http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1342239/Brain-study-reveals-right-wing-conservatives-larger-primitive-amygdala.html
ReplyDeleteWould be interesting to get the coalition government scanned and see which cabinet members come out with the giant amygdala...
HA! That literally HAS to be done. I'm going to try and organise it!
ReplyDelete