The ideological brain: the radical science of flexible thoughtby Leor Zmigrod
Having a mind to a track can feel pretty good. “We have beliefs, yes, but we can also become possessed by them,” writes the neuroscientist Leor Zmigrod in his new animated book, “the ideological brain”. We could speak to a great game of “freedom” while being terrified by the uncertainty that accompanies it. It is human to be hoped for clarity provided by a system that tells us how to think and what to do: “Human brains absorb ideological convictions with vigor and thirst.”
Zmigrod says that she knows because she studied the links between brain biology and political ideology. She started her experiences during the months between the Brexit referendum in Great Britain and the 2016 presidential election in the United States. Using a method called the Wisconsin cards sorting test, she followed the way her subjects responded to a sudden and arbitrary change of the rules. She also studied research on the amygdal, the almond -shaped structure in each hemisphere of the brain which treats emotions, in particular those negative such as fear and disgust.
The conservatives, she says, often have larger tonsils. However, discovering what comes first – if people with larger tonsils are attracted to conservative ideologies, or conservative ideologies make the tonsils of larger people – “is a continuous business”.
In other words, science is not settled. Indeed, “the ideological brain” turns out to be surprisingly unclear to say about the ideological brain. Zmigrod is a guide capable through the filled of scientific research, but his book necessarily includes some “to-sure” paragraphs conceding that some of the most attractive discoveries have not been reproduced. “The best neuroscientific studies are constructed slowly, iteratively and thoughtful,” she writes. “The warnings and prudent qualifications are rarely fascinating (the limits of our imagination are rarely), but they are intellectually honest.”
And intellectual honesty is finally what this book is talking about. Ideologists tend to be “cognitively rigid,” said Zmigrod. Their resistance to the modification of their mind makes them slow to adapt to new information that questions their priors. She quotes research by the psychologist Else Frenkel-Brunswik, who fled Austria after the Anschluss. Setting up in Berkeley, California, Frenkel-Brunswik decided to learn how, as she said, “the ethnocentric child becomes a potential fascist.” She found that parents who favored imagination and empathy encouraged the cognitive flexibility of their children. On the other hand, the parents who reigned with an iron fist produced children who welcomed the domination of others. For these children, “all relationships were uneven and intrinsically abusive”. They idolized strict fathers. Such cult was a way of “justifying their own oppressions, the militarization of their imagination and their desires”.
In other words, a rigid environment can make the mind more rigid – a discovery that is not exactly overwhelming. But Frenkel-Brunswik noticed something more unexpected. Children raised in domineering households had both signs of “disintegration and rigidity”. They were “fascinated by chaos, upheavals and disaster”. They demanded order while fetish disorder.
Zmigrod, in his own experiences, found something similar. She invited 300 Americans to answer a questionnaire on their ideological visions of the world and to participate in a computer game that was measuring fractional decisions. Dogmatic participants struggled to effectively reconstruct perceptual evidence, but they did not consider themselves slow thinkers. “They reported thrills and reckless choices,” writes Zmigrod. “The unconscious cognitive machine of a dogmatic person is slower, but their high -level conscious personalities mean that they make impulsive decisions.” They will insist on the law and the order, while also reveling to burn the establishment.
It is this carelessness that distinguishes the right extremist from the prudent curator. But Zmigrod stresses several times that his interest is for the ideological brain, that his policy is identifiable as “left” or “right”. Halfway through the book, she explains why, according to her results, the most flexible cognitively individuals are “the non-partists who look to the left”. She insists that she does not defend a centrist complacency or a “diluted and narrowed moderation”. But it pleads for a minimalist form of liberalism, which it defines as “openness to evidence and debate”. Over the exhortations, it is perfectly reasonable, so banal.
Zmigrod suggests that our understanding of ideology has itself become too ideological. She tells the fascinating story of Count Antoine Louis Claude Detutt de Tracy, a nobleman imprisoned during the French Revolution who invented the term ideological Designate what he hoped to be a “legitimate science that would use objective methods to determine how humans generate beliefs”. THE ideologists I considered a society that would encourage individuals to think critically. However, Tracy’s approach was ridiculed by a range of detractors, including Napoleon Bonaparte, Karl Marx and even the founding fathers of America, which Zmigrod characterizes as “too strongly” on the notion of a community identity. “Ideology had committed the crime to focus reason and observation to the detriment of the collective myth and magical thought,” she writes.
This original understanding of “ideology” – the impartial study of beliefs – has been lost in time, and now transmits its opposite: a passionate commitment to beliefs. Ideologist give way to ideologist. Zmigrod deplores this tour. The last sentence in “the ideological brain” calls for a day when we could envisage a “mind without ideology”.
It is an argument that is personal to Zmigrod, which describes his own discomfort each time someone asks her where she comes from. “My grandparents grew up by speaking a language, and my parents cultivated the slang of another, while I learned the grammars and the shades of completely different scripts,” she writes. “We have all become majestic on different continents, the hearts breaking in different sky, overlooking different seas, our secrets and our curses whispered in different languages.”
Zmigrod is such an attractive writer that he is easy to slide on some of the most bad implications in his book. What happens when the flexible spirit is accompanied by an autocracy? How does he react to a moral atrocity? Does this set up resistance? Or, in its infinite adaptability, does it acquiesce and go with the flow, as unfair?
“The non -ideological person strives of intellectual humility – being continuously open to update their beliefs in light of credible evidence and to balance a good dose of skepticism against myth manufacturing practices with humanist sympathy towards those who feel obliged to engage with collective ideologies,” she writes.
It all seems really good. I can see how we would be better if each person on the planet was attached to “intellectual humility” and “humanist sympathy”. But I’m not sure I needed a neuroscientist to tell me.
The ideological brain:: The radical science of flexible thought | By Leor Zmigrod | Holt | 287 pp. | $ 29.99