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Neuropolitics


Neuropolitics investigates the interplay between the brain and politics. It combines work from a variety of scientific fields including neuroscience, political science, psychology, behavioral genetics, primatology, and ethology. Often, neuropolitics research borrow methods from cognitive neuroscience to investigate classic questions from political science such as how people make political decisions, form political / ideological attitudes, evaluate political candidates, and interact in political coalitions. However, another line of research considers the role that evolving political competition has had on the development of the brain in humans and other species. The research in neuropolitics often intersects with work in genopolitics, political physiology, neuroeconomics, and neurolaw.

Philosophers, including Plato and John Locke, have long theorized about the nature of human thought and used these theories as a basis for their political philosophy. In Locke's view, humans entered the world with a mind that was a blank slate and formed governments as a result of the necessities imposed by the state of nature. Though Locke was trained in medicine, he became skeptical about the value of anatomical studies of the brain and concluded that no useful insights about mental faculties could be developed by studying it.

Roger Sperry and colleagues performed the first published neuropolitics experiment in 1979 with split-brain patients who had their corpus-callosum severed and thus had two brain hemispheres with severely impaired communication. The researchers showed photos of political figures to each of the patients' eyes (and thus each distinct brain hemisphere) separately and asked them to give a "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" evaluation. Both hemispheres were shown to be capable of rendering a political attitude about the people they were viewing. For instance, Adolf Hitler and Fidel Castro were given a thumbs down, while Winston Churchill was given a thumbs up, and Richard Nixon was given a thumb in the neutral position (the experiments were carried out prior to full revelation of the Watergate scandal.) Interestingly, each hemisphere attempted to communicate clues about the identity of the individuals to the other hemisphere. This study demonstrated that neurological approaches could inform researchers' understanding of political attitudes.


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