We're on the eve of an election in the province of Ontario. My fingers have hovered over the keyboard for a few days now, wondering whether this was an appropriate venue for my political opinions and ultimately deciding, wisely I think, that it isn't.
But I can't help making at least a passing reference to an interesting recent investigation of the differences between liberal and conservative brains. In a study published in October in Nature Neuroscience, it was reported that those people who describe themselves as 'liberal' do better than those who describe themselves as 'conservative' on a simple kind of response inhibition task called a "Go -NoGo task". In this task, participants are presented with a simple display (in this case it was a letter on a computer monitor) and they are required to press a button very quickly whenever they see the letter (GO!). The catch is that on a few trials, a fairly small proportion of trials, they are presented with a different letter and the instruction to not respond (NO-GO!). Though this sounds like a simple task, 500 trials of it, especially when being needled to go as quickly as possible, is enough to cause anyone to make some errors. What's interesting is that self-identified conservatives are not quite as good at reining in their responses on the NO-GO trials, and they don't show the same patterns of brain activity that are seen in self-identified liberals (an area of the brain called the 'anterior cingulate cortex' appears to play a special role in generating inhibitory responses in this task). Interestingly, some older research suggests that these kinds of differences may even be heritable.
So what does all of this mean? I suppose one interpretation would be to say that conservative minds work well when we expect what has always worked to continue to work. Liberal minds, in contrast, might shine when our habitual responses are no longer working and something new is needed. So where are we right now in Ontario? Canada? The world? That's for each of us to answer for ourselves -- and not just on our election days, but every day.
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