Month: February 2006

Political bias affects brain activity, study finds:

Democrats and Republicans alike are adept at making decisions without letting the facts get in the way, a new study shows.

And they get quite a rush from ignoring information that’s contrary to their point of view.

Researchers asked staunch party members from both sides to evaluate information that threatened their preferred candidate prior to the 2004 Presidential election. The subjects’ brains were monitored while they pondered.

The results were announced today.

“We did not see any increased activation of the parts of the brain normally engaged during reasoning,” said Drew Westen, director of clinical psychology at Emory University. “What we saw instead was a network of emotion circuits lighting up, including circuits hypothesized to be involved in regulating emotion, and circuits known to be involved in resolving conflicts.”

Bias on both sides

The test subjects on both sides of the political aisle reached totally biased conclusions by ignoring information that could not rationally be discounted, Westen and his colleagues say.

Then, with their minds made up, brain activity ceased in the areas that deal with negative emotions such as disgust. But activity spiked in the circuits involved in reward, a response similar to what addicts experience when they get a fix, Westen explained.

The study points to a total lack of reason in political decision-making.

“None of the circuits involved in conscious reasoning were particularly engaged,” Westen said. “Essentially, it appears as if partisans twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope until they get the conclusions they want, and then they get massively reinforced for it, with the elimination of negative emotional states and activation of positive ones.”

Notably absent were any increases in activation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain most associated with reasoning.

Man, I really have to write that post that tries to tie all this together. There’s a war for your mind and emotions every single day of your life, and it’s getting harder and harder to remain on the sidelines.

Republicans committed vote fraud in their own internal election for House Majority Leader.

And people wonder why some folks think that Presidential elections got stolen? I mean, these are the leading Republicans in the country, and they can’t even manage their own elections, where everybody knows each other.

Unreal and just sad.

Why View From Above? Because I’m pretty dang tall, 6’6.

Fine, but why does that mean you should listen to me? Well, there’s this:

Tall men get better education – Science – MSNBC.com:

Swedish study: 6-foot-4 and taller are higher achievers

STOCKHOLM – A study of 950,000 Swedish men has shown that taller men get a better education, a researcher said on Wednesday.

The study, to be published in the International Journal of Epidemiology, could suggest short people are discriminated against as they are expected to be low achievers, said researcher Finn Rasmussen at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute.

“The probability of achieving higher education in later life increases linearly with height,” said the study.

It looked at male conscripts into the Swedish army born between 1950 and 1975 and their education for up to 27 years after their height was measured at the age of 18.

“Men taller than 194 centimeters (6-foot-4) were two to three times more likely to obtain a higher education when compared with men shorter than 165 centimeters,” it added.

Feeding variables into the study such as social background or intelligence as measured by IQ altered the outcome slightly, but a clear link between height and educational attainment remained, the research said.

The scientists did not draw conclusions, but Rasmussen said it could be something to do with social attitudes.

“We do not know if people have negative attitudes to short people. It is possible that there could something in society about the expectations of people or attitudes to what people can perform,” he told Reuters.

But really, some of my best friends are short people. (Like I have options.)

If the State of the Union is so strong, how is it that it can’t stand against women wearing t-shirts in the balcony?

Somehow, I am reminded of being scolded for putting pennies on the railroad tracks when I was a kid, being told it was a danger for the trains, which could be derailed. This scared me more than anything– there were miles of railroad tracks where people could put pennies, and that could cause the entire thing to fly apart? You couldn’t pay me enough to ride on a train if that was true.

The same thing applies here.

David Mack gets interviewed here about writing for Trek. And oddly enough, I’m mentioned in passing, although I was going to link to it anyway before I read it and saw my name. (Really, who do you think I am, Mark Evanier?)

One day, I shall tell the true story of how Dave and John Ordover met…

(Via Trek Today.)

I met her a few years back at Lynne Thigpen’s combination birthday/Hannakwanzaamas shindig. (Lynne won the Tony appearing in Wendy’s An American Daughter, coming on stage drenched head to toe.) Everybody was supposed to bring an ornament for the tree– I brought a talking Darth Vader ornament, since Lynne had done numerous shows with James Earl Jones.

Wendy didn’t bring an ornament. Quickly improvising, she reached into her handbag and pulled out an empty prescription bottle for Valium. She poked a hole in the lid, put a hook through it and hung it from the tree.

A one-of-a-kind ornament from a one-of-a-kind lady. Selah.