"Freedom's just another word for.....the dopaminergic activation system?"
Freedom. No other concept would have as much impact on the political and economic landscape of modern civilization. No other concept would be so uniformly embraced by Conservatives--not even religion. Liberals would also exhibit a preference for freedom, but not nearly with the complete uniformity of Conservatives.
Dopamine: Molecule of Freedom? (Green=Carbon, White=Hydrogen, Red=Oxygen, Blue=Nitrogen)People that are attracted to the concept of freedom are more likely to be religious. This relationship between freedom and religious disposition is more than just coincidental.
The evolution of the nervous system would incorporate many different neurotransmitters and other neurochemicals to provide effective responses to the wide variety of survival situations, but one would hold a special place in human evolution.
Human language would incorporate a widely distributed neural network, and dopamine would be a key player. Dopaminergic neurotransmission provides a significant advantage when it comes to controlling speech and other forms of fine-motor control.
Dopamine and dopamine receptors regularize the firing of neurons. As such, dopaminergic activity reduces the "noise" in neural networks, and therefore improves the signal-to-noise ratio that is valuable for the very fine motor control of speech muscles and the semantic requirements of language.
But this leap in semantic language development is a relatively recent adaptation of dopamine. Dopamine is organized into several major well-defined pathways supporting a variety of other functions related to physical activity and motivation.
Major Dopamine Pathways (in blue)In the above diagram, we see a pathway starting at a nucleus in the brainstem, called the substantia nigra, that extends into the striatum/basal ganglia. This dopamine pathway controls automatic movement, which supports such things as walking, reaching, and grasping.
Damage to this pathway reduces the ability to move. The basal ganglia pathway of this dopamine circuit is further connected to premotor and motor areas of the cortex. The orbitial cortex is the final stop on this circuit, and is involved in the higher planning of one's actions.
Another important pathway starts at the ventral tegmental area, and extends through the limbic system and terminating in the frontal cortical areas involved in emotion, pleasure, and goal-seeking.
The dopamine pathways collectively compose the dopaminergic activation system, which has been proposed by Tucker and Williamson to be asymmetrically distributed in the left hemisphere.
The low-noise and high signal quality of the various dopamine networks would not only support movement, fine motor skills, semantic language, and arithmetic--but also motivation and goal-seeking.
Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness
No other neurochemical would leave its signature on the American Revolution quite like dopamine, due primarily to the goal-seeking nature of the highly active dopaminergic system.
Conservative mental attributes are more closely associated with highly active dopaminergic systems, and the Conservative advantages in semantic language processing and arithmetic calculation are a natural result.
The unambiguous cognitive styles of Conservatives are firmly rooted in the higher signal-to-noise neural communication of dopaminergic networks. Conversely, Liberals exhibit more ambiguous cognitive styles, consistent the noradrenergic activation system which is distributed asymmetrically in the right hemisphere.
Active goal-seeking dopaminergic networks function best in environments that reduce interference or frustration. This is evident in the Conservative's universal preference of Freedom over Equality.
The cognitive evidence of this preference is striking. We asked the 2,104 respondents in our Fall 2005 survey which was more important, freedom or equality?
Red=Those Indicating Freedom as more Important
Blue=Those Indicating Equality as more Important
98.5% of the Conservative males and 95.4% of the Conservative females preferred Freedom over Equality. In contrast, 62.2% of Liberal males and 53.2% of Liberal females preferred Freedom over Equality.
This uniform preference that Conservatives have for Freedom has no peer with other Conservative belief tendencies. In our survey, only 73% of Conservative males and 80% of Conservative females held conventional religious beliefs. Freedom is more universally preferred by Conservatives than even religion.
This leads us to some interesting speculations about the various dopamine pathways in the brain and their respective influences on political and religious attitudes. Does the dopamine pathway arising from the substantia nigra inhibit religious attitudes in the left hemisphere? Does the pathway arising from the ventral tegmental area promote them?
Next month we will discuss the noradrenergic activation system, which is strongly implicated in Liberal mental attributes.
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Beef, It's What's for Conservatism???
At Neuropolitics.org, we ask a lot of questions to Conservatives and Liberals. The responses to most questions usually vary somewhat between Conservatives and Liberals, but are not statistically significant, and usually go unreported.
However, sometimes we are caught offguard. One of the strongest variations we've ever seen involves, of all things, beef. What could beef possibly have to do with politics?
But the differences were not just significant, they were nearly a linear function as one moved from left to right on the political scale, at least for the males.
Let's look at the percentages of the political cohorts that preferred beef over other meats. The survey consisted of 2,104 people.
Beef as Favorite Meat by Political/Gender CohortsWhile the females show a general tendency to favor beef as one becomes more conservative, the males show a consistent elevation as one goes from left to right in the political spectrum.
So what does beef have over other meats? Beef is very rich in vitamin B-12, used in the production of tetrahydrobiopterin, which is an essential coenzyme used in the production of dopamine and serotonin. A diet rich in beef will increase sperm counts and sperm motility.
Beef is also rich in zinc, which has been found to assist in the improved functioning of dopaminergic networks. And finally, iron is also implicated in the proper functioning of dopaminergic networks.
If you eat a lot of beef, do you become more conservative? If you are conservative, do you eat more beef? More to come on this surprising and significant dietary preference.
NeuroMorality
Neural Networks That Regulate Social Behavior in Conservatives and Liberals
The human brain devotes so many resources in processing and reacting to social stimuli that it's primary function seems to be that of a social calculator. It has been estimated that the brain can resolve the emotional significance of 7,000 different facial and bodily expressions.
Both emotional and cognitive neural networks have been adapted into social regulation mechanisms such as empathy and morality, but are Conservatives and Liberals using the morality neural networks in the same way?
"It is judgment that defeats us"--Marlon Brando's Colonel Kurtz, weighing the applicability of morality in warfare.In our Fall 2005 Survey, Conservatives were more likely than Liberals to cite morality as primary reason for their political decision making, and Liberals were more likely to cite social concern. These tendencies were also proportional with the strength of conservative or liberal beliefs.
More of the neural activity involved in emotional recognition (and empathy) is distributed asymmetrically in the right hemisphere. This frees up the left hemisphere to handle the demands of semantic language and fine motor control, and generally take advantage of dopamine's superior signal-to-noise ratio in neural communication.
But this natural advantage of dopaminergic transmission would also be a disadvantage in neural networks that support the perception and integration of a wide variety of environmental stimuli, including social stimuli.
For this, norepinephrine would prove more effective. Norepinephrine networks not only maintain attention to the environment, but are also sensitive to anomalies in the incoming sensory data. They will interrupt other competing neural processes and quiet them, or possibly even redirect them into analysis or response to the relevant environmental targets.
The development of semantic language would cause a bit of a dilemma for the brain---how will it handle the competing tasks of semantic language processing and environmental attention at the same time? The brain would take advantage of the hemispheric specialization inherited from earlier species.
The asymmetric specialization of semantic language into one hemisphere and attention processes into the other would provide a measure of isolation of these two systems, and would subsequently improve their efficiency. This works as long as semantic language processing could be interrupted from its activities to attend to pressing environmental issues.
But much more was at stake than just language and environmental attention. Related activities would also be asymmetrically distributed--one of the most important being social calculation. The average human has quite a sizable array of social information to keep track of.
For example, do you know if your boss is at work today? Do you know if your boss is angry at you? You don't have to try to remember these things, as your brain naturally focuses on authority figures in your respective social groups.
Do you owe someone money? Does someone owe you money? Did someone not kick in their fair share at your last lunch together? Is someone not pulling their weight at work? Did you try to resolve if the new person at work is at your level, higher, or lower?
Tracking and responding to these types of inequalities in your daily social relationships is instinctual--so much so that even the Lord's Prayer addresses it: "forgive us for our trespasses as we forgive those that trespass against us". This inequality monitoring occurs in many primates, and has possibly contributed to the neural rendering of arithmetic reasoning in humans.
However, inequality monitoring is just one part of the overall social calculus supported by the brain. Living in social groups requires limitations to a number of undesirable behaviors, including sexual misconduct and violence, and the brain would adapt a number of neural structures to address these issues.
fMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) of moral dilemmas would show significant coordination among neural networks in resolving moral paradoxes. One of the pioneers in the field of neuromorality, Joshua Greene, asked people how they would respond if they were faced with the decision to flip a switch that would eventually lead to one person's death in order to save five other people (the famous trolley dilemma).
Most people would say yes to this situation. It seems that most people would employ the utilitarian, or greatest social benefit philosophy in the more impersonal judgment of indirectly killing someone to save others. However, when they were asked to physically kill the person themselves, instead of just flipping a switch, most would say no.
More interesting were the variations in neural activity exposed during fMRI. In the case of physically killing someone, fMRI would indicate higher activity in neural networks normally involved with emotional processing. This would lay to rest the traditional moral psychological theories which maintained that morality was the result of "reasoning" or "higher cognition". Morality was definitely regulated by more primitive neural networks. But the brain is famous for its rather sloppy mousetrap-like neural organization, and the so called "higher cognitive" networks would wrestle a measure of control from the more primitive emotional networks.
Greene would later up the ante in a subsequent study. The question he then posed was based on whether they would physically smother their crying baby to save the lives of many people if enemy soldiers were approaching, and the baby would give away their position, subsequently killing everyone.
The dials would jump on this one, and Greene found that the relative elevation in the activation of emotional networks was more likely for those responding no, whereas the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and the anterior dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) were more highly activated for those saying yes. While the reason for the elevation in activity of the ACC is subject to multiple interpretations, (one of which involves it being a part of a network that turns on the DLPFC), the DLPFC evidence is more viable, as it has been previously implicated in social decision making.
The Anterior Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex-one of the brain regions instrumental in attitudes about abortion?Greene's moral dilemmas were becoming closer and closer to the question of abortion. We speculate that the anterior dorsolateral prefrontal cortex may also be a key area in resolving attitudes towards abortion, although this remains to be seen.
The general implication of Greene's (and others) work is that moralistic attitudes are moderated by a combination of various neural structures that have been added to the brain's arsenal at different evolutionary times. The amygdala and posterior cingulate, part of the brain's emotional network, are older structures, and adapted into moral judgments that regulate direct interaction with other conspecifics.
The DLPFC is a new player in the neural circus, and adapted into social outcome analysis, which integrates a variety of motivational information, (which includes emotional morality events), retrieves and integrates relevant memories, projects social and personal outcomes, and subsequently moderates behavior.
The fMRI evidence from Greene's research would show a left hemispheric bias in neural structures engaged in what Greene would call "easy personal" or deontologic moral resolution, and an increase in right hemispheric activity when the moral resolution became more "difficult".
In contrast, when deontologic or personal moral principles were overridden in favor of the utilitarian or greater social good principles, such as killing one to save many, the right hemispheric structures predominate in the decision. But Greene's sample consisted of Princeton undergraduate students--not very representative of the human population.
Chap would provide cognitive evidence that age is a significant factor in morality attitudes, as older people make more definitive moral judgments than young people. The left hemisphere's propensity for unambiguous cognition is probably driving this phenomenon, as there is significant evidence that the right hemisphere ages faster than the left.
According to Greene, there is no "specifically moral" part of the brain. Every brain region implicated with morality has also been implicated in non-moral functions. There are good reasons for this. The complexity of social regulation mechanisms and environmental variations does not fit well with a single neural and moral control system, but rather a distributed system that handles a wide variety of survival scenarios.
The Conservative's preference for morality in political decision making certainly implies the greater influence of the left hemispheric neural networks that support deontologic moral decision making. In our cognitive laterality survey earlier this year, we noted that Conservatives were shifted towards the left hemisphere in our scoring system, and Liberals shifted towards the right. These personal or deontologic moral forms are a superset of conventional Western religious moral forms, such as those found in the Ten Commandments.
Conversely, Liberals are more inclined towards right hemispheric neural structures in moral decision making, which are more likely to reverse personal or deontologic morality responses, and apply utilitarian, or greatest social good analysis in their moral decisions.
Brack and Zhang, December 2005
Email: Brack@neuropolitics.org
Zhang@neuropolitics.org
4075
Political and Sexual Arousal in Conservatives and Liberals
(Part 2)In last month's issue, we discussed the concept of political arousal, which was introduced to describe the wide variations in political awareness between individuals. Some individuals are constantly aroused over political issues, and others are not. What is behind this wide range of political arousal?
Based on the responses to our Fall 2005 survey, we found that Liberals tend to think about politics a little more than Conservatives, on average. The Very Liberals spend the most time thinking about politics, followed by the Very Conservatives, of both genders. Males, on average, spend more time thinking about politics than do females.
We also found that Moderates were by far the least politically aroused group. This is an important clue. The further one varies from middle-of-the-road political attitudes, the more likely one is going think about politics. In our laterality survey earlier this year, the Very Liberals scored highest on the right-hemispheric side of the brain dominance scale, and the Very Conservatives scored highest on the left-hemispheric side.
We also discussed female sexual arousal, and found that the Conservative females were more elevated at the high and low end of the conscious sexual awareness scale. The Conservative females were more likely to show high or low rates of conscious sexual awareness. In contrast, the Liberal females were elevated in the intermediate portion of this scale.
We also found a very strong decline in conscious sexual awareness with advancing age. However, we noted an interesting trend--females report higher receptivity to hugging and touching as they grow older, and report the lowest receptivity to hugging in the Under 25 age group---which ironically is the same group that reports the highest rate of conscious sexual awareness.
We proposed that this tendency was consistent with a shifting of female sexual arousal mechanisms towards the somatosensory (tactile) cortex from other sensory systems, such as visual, auditory, and olfactory. This might assist in longer term partner-bonding, as females are less likely to be stimulated by the sights, sounds, and smells of non-partners. In this issue, we will focus on males.
Rates of Sexual Arousal in Males
We asked the 2,104 participants to our Fall 2005 survey two questions: "how often do you think about sex?", and another about "how often do you like to be hugged or touched?". The males would report an unexpected sexual awareness profile.
The first graph shows the percentage of males by political cohort that responded "many times a day" to our first question "how often do you think about sex?".
Males Thinking About Sex Many Times A Day - by Political Cohort
(Lib=Liberal, Con=Conservative)As you see, it isn't the Under 25 males that have the highest rates of conscious sexual awareness. Rather, it is the 25-49 age group that is the most elevated in both Conservatives and Liberals. This is contrary to our expectations, and also contrary to the females, which had the highest rate of conscious sexual focus in the Under 25 age group.
But it is the Liberal males that report higher rates of conscious sexual awareness in both the Under 25 and 25-49 age groups. In the 50+ group, the results are even.
Now let's take a look at our intermediate group, those males that answered "a few times a day" in the graph below:
Males Thinking About Sex a Few Times A Day - by Political CohortThe Conservatives have higher rates of intermediate sexual arousal, except in the 50+ age group. where the Liberal males have a significant elevation.
Now let's take a look at our final group which consists of those males that reported thinking about sex a "few times a week" or "little".
Males Thinking About Sex a Little - by Political CohortIn the above graph, the Conservative and Liberal males show similar patterns, but the Conservatives are more sharply elevated in the 50+ cohort. The Conservatives indicate a much steeper decline in conscious sexual focus with age. The Liberal males maintain higher conscious sexual awareness throughout their life span.
However, mechanisms that promote (and inhibit) sexual behavior exist in all of the sensory processing systems, including visual, auditory, olfactory, and the somatosensory. Let's look at an indicator of somatosensory arousal--we asked another question, "how often do you like to be hugged or touched?" The results for those answering "Frequently" to this question are in the graph below:
Males That Frequently Like To Be Hugged or Touched - by Political CohortAs we see in the above graph, the Liberal males are more likely to prefer hugging and touching than Conservatives across every age group. The males, like the females, increase in their desire for hugging and touching as their conscious sexual awareness decreases with age.
Discussion
Relative to females, the males reported higher rates of conscious sexual awareness, as expected. What was not expected was that he 25-49 age group reported higher conscious sexual awareness than the Under 25 group. This occurs across all of the political cohorts, and the probability that this is a statistical anomaly is low. As of yet, we have no hypothesis to explain this curious phenomenon.
The Liberals report higher rates of conscious sexual awareness across all age groups, and maintain that awareness longer than Conservatives. They also report higher rates of desire for hugging and touching, which increases with age (as conscious sexual awareness decreases).
There is substantial evidence implicating the temporal lobes in sexual activity. However, the survival value of sexual behavior is so great that the neural networks involving sexual behavior are extensive, involve cortical and sub-cortical structures, a variety of neurochemicals, and a different organization in each hemisphere.
While Liberals reported higher sexual focus, the caucasian Conservative males generate more offspring per male. The relative procreative effectiveness of Conservatives, in light of their reduced conscious sexual focus, will be discussed in the final installment of this article.
Finally, let's look at a very interesting graph. This graph consolidates the male and female respondents that frequently like to be hugged or touched.
Males and Females That Frequently Like To Be Hugged or Touched - by Political CohortIn the above graph, we see that Conservative females have the highest preference towards hugging and touching, and the Conservative males the least. The Liberal females and males fall in between. We will discuss this result and the neurosexual correlates that may explain it in the next installment.
