In response to question about Syrian refugees Ben Carson brags about the size of his frontal lobes.

Courtesy of Raw Story: 

"We should use our expertise and resources to help get them resettled — over there — and to support them over there,” he said. “But to bring them here under these circumstances is a suspension of intellect.” 

“You know that the human brain has these big frontal lobes, as opposed to other animals, because we can engage in rational thought processing.” 

The former neurosurgeon noted that his advanced brain gave him the ability to “extract information from the past [and] present, process it, and project it into a plan.” 

“Animals, on the other hand, have big brain stems and rudimentary things because they react,” Carson explained. “We don’t have to just react, we can think.”

You know I actually agree with Carson that human beings DO possess the ability to use rational thought processes.

However knowing that Carson realizes that as well, makes it all the more difficult to understand why he believes that humans cannot have morality without God, that Noah's flood was real and Evolution was inspired by Satan, and that the pyramids were built to store grain instead of the bodies of he pharaohs?

Does this mean that Ben Carson's frontal lobes are not that big? (Not that size is everything of course.)

Or perhaps it means that he simply refuses to utilize them if by doing so it endangers his faith in certain mythologies or conspiracy theories.

When it comes to listening to Ben Carson lecture people about using their developed brains for reasoning, I cannot help but to fall back on that old "Physician heal thyself" chestnut.

"Religion is really made by the brain. It is a secretion of the brain."

Lionel Tiger is a Canadian-born, American-based anthropologist. He is the Charles Darwin Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University and co-Research Director of the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation.

I swear as much as I love politics, this is the kind of thing that really gets my intellectual juices flowing. I guess in my case brain secretions are caused by pursuing an understanding of the origins, purpose, and benefits to humans of religion.

The LA Times knows exactly where President Obama's $110 million dollar brain initiative should focus first. Here's a hint, it's best to start small.

Courtesy of the LA Times:

President Obama wants to invest an initial $110 million in a study of the human brain that could have benefits as great as those achieved by the Human Genome Project. Maybe the first study should be done on the one-track minds of tea party Republicans, who will undoubtedly oppose funding for the study because their brains are fixated on the single idea that government can do nothing right. 

After that, researchers could move on to figuring out Sarah Palin’s brain. Perhaps they could answer this question: How can a person with so little knowledge and so little interest in acquiring knowledge imagine that she has what it takes to be president of the United States? Is it an example of the George W. Bush effect? (“Hey, if he can be president, anybody can.”) Inquiring minds want to know.

Look as much as I usually support the idea of scientific exploration, I think Sarah Palin's mind is  kind of like "Pandora's box." In other words, some things are best left locked up tight.

One can only imagine the dark twisty convoluted corridors constructed to keep her secrets hidden from view and the steel spring traps she has laid for those who would attempt to untie the Gordian knot of her  psyche.

After all this is a woman who has constructed layers upon layers of mythology to hide her true nature from public scrutiny. I don't think even Indiana Jones would have the balls to enter that death trap.

Other than that I think this brain mapping thing, and its potential for uncovering information that will help to treat traumatic brain injuries and alleviate the suffering of those with Alzheimer's, sounds amazing.

However I would also give up on trying to understand the brains of the Teabaggers. Some things science simply cannot hope to fathom.

New studies of the brain indicate that Republicans and Democrats use different parts of it to make political decisions. Guess which one uses their "threat response system!"

Courtesy of Mother Jones:  

The past two weeks have seen not one but two studies published in scientific journals on the biological underpinnings of political ideology. And these studies go straight at the role of genes and the brain in shaping our views, and even our votes. 

First, in the American Journal of Political Science, a team of researchers including Peter Hatemi of Penn State University and Rose McDermott of Brown University studied the relationship between our deep-seated tendencies to experience fear—tendencies that vary from person to person, partly for reasons that seem rooted in our genes—and our political beliefs. What they found is that people who have more fearful disposition also tend to be more politically conservative, and less tolerant of immigrants and people of races different from their own. As McDermott carefully emphasizes, that does not mean that every conservative has a high fear disposition. "It's not that conservative people are more fearful, it's that fearful people are more conservative," as she puts it. 

I interviewed the paper's lead author, Peter Hatemi, about his research for my 2012 book The Republican Brain. Hatemi is both a political scientist and also a microbiologist, and as he stressed to me, "nothing is all genes, or all environment." These forces combine to make us who we are, in incredibly intricate ways. 

And if Hatemi's and McDermott's research blows your mind, get this: Darren Schreiber, a political neuroscientist at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, first performed brain scans on 82 people participating in a risky gambling task, one in which holding out for more money increases your possible rewards, but also your possible losses. Later, cross-referencing the findings with the participants' publicly available political party registration information, Schreiber noticed something astonishing: Republicans, when they took the same gambling risk, were activating a different part of the brain than Democrats. 

Republicans were using the right amygdala, the center of the brain's threat response system. Democrats, in contrast, were using the insula, involved in internal monitoring of one's feelings. Amazingly, Schreiber and his colleagues write that this test predicted 82.9 percent of the study subjects' political party choices—considerably better, they note, than a simple model that predicts your political party affiliation based on the affiliation of your parents.

Okay I have read various versions of these studies the past several days and they are both fascinating and frustrating to me.

According to the data there does not seem to be a whole lot that one can do to change a person's political point of view. Which in some ways explains why introducing new facts to people with a conservative perspective seems to be a waste of perfectly good data. They simply refuse to accept its existence or challenge the methods by which is was gathered.

It also seems to explain why conservatives are so incredibly concerned about gun ownership and national security. They apparently base their world view on the fear center of their brains, which is constantly on alert for danger, while where as the more liberal among us are using the insula, whihc has been described by neurosurgeons as the following:

According to neuroscientists who study it, the insula is a long-neglected brain region that has emerged as crucial to understanding what it feels like to be human. 

They say it is the wellspring of social emotions, things like lust and disgust, pride and humiliation, guilt and atonement. It helps give rise to moral intuition, empathy and the capacity to respond emotionally to music.

Well that certainly explains quite a lot doesn't it?

Essentially, according to the new research, Republicans make their political decisions based on fear, and Democrats tend to make them based on empathy and moral intuition.

Sounds reasonable to me.

Scariest movie concept ever!

Courtesy of some dude on Reddit's aunt.