In her new book, “The Ideological Brain,” the neuroscientist Leor Zmigrod outlines what makes some people prone to rigid thinking.

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In my experiments I’ve found that the most rigid thinkers have genetic dispositions related to how dopamine is distributed in their brains.

Rigid thinkers tend to have lower levels of dopamine in their prefrontal cortex and higher levels of dopamine in their striatum, a key midbrain structure in our reward system that controls our rapid instincts. So our psychological vulnerabilities to rigid ideologies may be grounded in biological differences.

In fact, we find that people with different ideologies have differences in the physical structure and function of their brains. This is especially pronounced in brain networks responsible for reward, emotion processing, and monitoring when we make errors.

For instance, the size of our amygdala — the almond-shaped structure that governs the processing of emotions, especially negatively tinged emotions such as fear, anger, disgust, danger and threat — is linked to whether we hold more conservative ideologies that justify traditions and the status quo.

  • @[email protected]
    10•4 days ago

    If you had paid attention, or read the article at all, you would have noticed that they noticed changes in brain wiring, but have no idea if it is certain ideology causing brain wiring differences or brain wiring differences causing certain ideology.

    You would have also noticed that it’s an actual scientist talking, who doesn’t seem to be making any outrageous claims, or anything you could call propaganda, no conclusions are drawn, so idk what the propaganda would even be for.

    It is a shortened article, which it also directly says in there, sometimes you just want a quick thought-teaser, allowing you to dive in deeper if it sounds interesting.

    It seems like you fall massively into preconceived notions, that while they may even be correct more often than not, your comment honestly just sounds like nonsense propaganda in this instance.

    • NSRXN
      5•4 days ago

      it’s an actual scientist talking, who doesn’t seem to be making any outrageous claims, or anything you could call propaganda, no conclusions are drawn, so idk what the propaganda would even be for.

      when did you last read the definitions of propaganda