Kanaev IA. Kanaev IA. Entropy (Basel). 2023 Feb 25;25(3):418. doi: 10.3390/e25030418. Entropy (Basel). 2023. PMID: 36981307 Free PMC article. Review. The Kerry question..."Thank you for expressing your support for the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. " what's that mean? Presumably there is a mistake and they meant the US invasion of Kuwait. Gore's statement, "Your premiums would go up by between 18% and 47%, and that is the study of the congressional plan that he's modelled his proposal on by the Medicare actuaries," may well have been accurate, and in rational terms, Gore had given Bush a beating. But in emotional terms, both the presentation of exact numbers (as opposed to "your premiums would go up by about a third") and the mention of actuaries undercut the story Gore most needed to tell the American people: that he cared about that 70-year-old man, and he would do something about it. Instead, his exacting reference to numbers and actuaries reinforced the story Bush wanted to tell about him: "Look, I'm like you, I don't care about all this fancy math. I care about people. They're just statistics to him."

Read the excerpt from the book below, watch the report and interview with Drew Westen on Newsnight, Wednesday 15 August and let us know your thoughts. And don't forget there's plenty of other titles in the Newsnight Book Club. None of the circuits involved in conscious reasoning were particularly engaged," says Westen. "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."

Scientific American columns

Zmigrod L. Zmigrod L. Perspect Psychol Sci. 2022 Jul;17(4):1072-1092. doi: 10.1177/17456916211044140. Epub 2022 Mar 1. Perspect Psychol Sci. 2022. PMID: 35231196 Free PMC article. Haufe, S., Treder, M. S., Gugler, M. F., Sagebaum, M., Curio, G., & Blankertz, B. (2011). EEG potentials predict upcoming emergency brakings during simulated driving. Journal of Neural Engineering, 8, 056001. Pace Will Rogers, I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a libertarian. As a fiscal conservative and social liberal, I have found at least something to like about each Republican or Democrat I have met. I have close friends in both camps, in which I have observed the following: no matter the issue under discussion, both sides are equally convinced that the evidence overwhelmingly supports their position.

The book started off in superb fashion-tossing out psychological gems like candy to the reader, but the grotesque bias that clouds an otherwise intelligent person makes this a difficult read and an awful philosophy. An edition of The political mind: why you can't understand 21st-century politics with an 18th-century brainOf course, one could point here to certain strands within anarchist traditions or within Marxism itself, which reject any political mediation and instead put forward direct or spontaneous action as a means of class struggle (I owe this remark to David Pavón Cuéllar). But one could argue, insofar as they conceive of a terrain or a reality, as I claim Massumi does, outside of class struggle itself, they actually undermine and leave behind class struggle. One could opt for a more Lacanian position here, and stress that there is nothing outside of ideology and politics precisely as these are non-All. That is, it is not that there is something that escapes ideology or is outside of it, rather, it is the totality of ideology itself that defies itself. Or, phrased otherwise, the holes in ideology are in the end ideological, and, one could argue, one of the central names for this hole is class struggle, the basic antagonism running through society. Notably absent were any increases in activation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain most associated with reasoning (as well as conscious efforts to suppress emotion). The finding suggests that the emotion-driven processes that lead to biased judgments likely occur outside of awareness, and are distinct from normal reasoning processes when emotion is not so heavily engaged, says Westen.

Computational and neurocognitive approaches to the political brain: key insights and future avenues for political neuroscience - PMC Understanding the the Neo Con Strategies of setting political agendas through emotionally charged frames is a crucial factor in the return of a highly authoritarian political style in many developed countries in the late 1970s. In What's the Matter with Kansas?, Thomas Frank pointed out that a great number of Americans actually vote against their own interests. In The Political Mind, George Lakoff explains why. The critical role of uncertainty in the neural mechanisms underpinning ideological behaviour was innovatively explored by Haas et al. [ 11]. In an fMRI paradigm that presented participants with leaders' policy positions that were either congruent or incongruent with the political candidate's stated party, and which were marked by variable levels of certainty, Haas et al. [ 11] analysed the ways in which political evaluation is modulated by uncertainty and ideological congruence. Similarly to Krosch et al.s' [ 10] findings, the study implicated heightened activation of the insular cortex, as well as the anterior cingulate cortex, in response to policy positions that were certain but incongruent with the political candidate's party affiliation. By contrast, diminished activation in the bilateral insula was evident when the policy statement was certain and ideologically congruent. Consequently, uncertainty and congruency interact to shape neural and behavioural responses to leaders' policy stances, underscoring that the brain's sensitivity to uncertainty modulates its experience of the political world.Rancière, J. (1998). Disagreement: Politics and philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Consider, in this respect, the similar critique of Ruth Leys: “manipulations operating below the level of ideology and consciousness can only be countered by manipulations of a similar kind” (Leys, 2011, p. 461, n. 48). Rigoli F. Rigoli F. Rev Philos Psychol. 2022 Aug 27:1-18. doi: 10.1007/s13164-022-00657-7. Online ahead of print. Rev Philos Psychol. 2022. PMID: 36060095 Free PMC article. De Vos, J. (2015). What is critique in the era of the neurosciences? In J. De Vos & E. Pluth (Eds.), Neuroscience and critique. Exploring the limits of the neurological turn. London: Routledge.

The investigators used functional neuroimaging (fMRI) to study a sample of committed Democrats and Republicans during the three months prior to the U.S. Presidential election of 2004. The Democrats and Republicans were given a reasoning task in which they had to evaluate threatening information about their own candidate. During the task, the subjects underwent fMRI to see what parts of their brain were active. What the researchers found was striking. Teresa Heinz-Kerry [Kerry's wife]: "John is the face of someone who's hopeful [photo of the two, possibly as newlyweds, with Kerry smiling broadly], who's generous of spirit and of heart." Libet, B. (1996). Commentary on ‘free will in the light of neuropsychiatry’. Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology, 3(2), 95–96. If you dissect this ad, you can readily see why it was one of the most effective television commercials in the history of American politics. Bill Clinton never shied away from policy debates, but this ad was not about policy. Its sole purpose was to begin creating a set of positive associations with him and a narrative about the Man from Hope - framed, from start to finish, in terms of hope and the American dream. We scanned their brains for activity as they read a series of slides. Our goal was to present them with reasoning tasks that would lead a “dispassionate” observer to an obvious logical conclusion, but would be in direct conflict with the conclusion a partisan Democrat or Republican would want to reach about his party’s candidate. In other words, our goal was to create a head-to-head conflict between the constraints on belief imposed by reason and evidence (data showing that the candidate had done something inconsistent, pandering, dishonest, slimy, or simply bad) and the constraints imposed by emotion (strong feelings toward the parties and the candidates). What we hoped to learn was how, in real time, the brain negotiates conflicts between data and desire. Although we were in relatively uncharted territory, we came in with some strong hunches, which scientists like to dignify with the label hypotheses. Guiding all these hypotheses was our expectation that when data clashed with desire, the political brain would somehow “reason” its way to the desired conclusions.

Sentiment is the deciding force in political affairs. Despots have know this since human societies first were ever formed!