Your World Depends On How You’re Wired

 A neuroscientist studies what makes so many people prone to rigid ways of thinking.

By MATT RICHTEL

So sharp are partisan divisions these days that it can seem as if people are experiencing entirely different realities. Maybe they actually are, according to Leor Zmigrod, a neuroscientist and political psychologist at Cambridge University. In a new book, “The Ideological Brain: The Radical Science of Flexible Thinking.” Dr. Zmigrod explores the emerging evidence that brain physiology and biology help explain not just why people are prone to ideology but how they perceive and share information.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.

What is ideology?

It’s a narrative about how the world works and how it should work. This potentially could be the social world or the natural world. But it’s not just a story: It has really rigid prescriptions for how we should think, how we should act, how we should interact with other people. An ideology condemns any deviation from its prescribed rules.

You write that rigid thinking can be tempting. Why is that?

Ideologies satisfy the need to try to understand the world, to explain it. And they satisfy our need for connection, for community, for just a sense that we belong to something.

There’s also a resource question. Exploring the world is really cognitively expensive, and just exploiting known patterns and rules can seem to be the most efficient and strategy. Also, many people argue many ideologies will try to tell you adhering to rules is the only good way to live and to live morally.

I actually come at it from a different perspective: Ideologies numb our direct experience of the world. They narrow our capacity to adapt to the world, to understand evidence, to distinguish between credible evidence and not credible evidence. Ideologies are rarely, if ever, good.

In the book, you describe research showing that ideological thinkers can be less reliable narrators. Can you explain?

Remarkably, we can observe this effect in children. In the 1940s, Else Frenkel- Brunswik, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, interviewed hundreds of children and tested their levels of authoritarianism, like prejudice and whether they championed conformity and obedience or play and imagination. When children were told a story about new pupils at a fictional school and asked to recount the story later, there were significant differences in what the most prejudiced children remembered, as opposed to the most liberal children.

Liberal children tended to recall more accurately the ratio of desirable and undesirable traits in the characters of the story; their memories possessed greater fidelity to the story as it was originally told. In contrast, children who scored highly on prejudice strayed from the story; they highlighted or invented undesirable traits for the characters from ethnic minority backgrounds.

So, the memories of the most ideologically minded children incorporated fictions that confirmed their pre-existing biases. At the same time, there was also a tendency to occasionally parrot single phrases and details, rigidly mimicking the storyteller.

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Mental Illness and Dementia | Energy Healing Therapies in Rye

Why do psychiatric conditions multiply the risk of cognitive decline?

Age is the single biggest risk factor for dementia, with the odds doubling about every five years after age 65. But many things influence those odds for a given individual. Genetic vulnerability is a contributor, as are so-called modifiable risk factors such as smoking, cardiovascular disease, social isolation, and impaired hearing and vision. Certain mental conditions, particularly depression and schizophrenia, have also been linked to dementia. But because depression can itself be a sign of cognitive decline, the causality has been a bit muddy. Earlier this year an analysis of data from New Zealand provided the most convincing evidence to date linking many kinds of mental illness with dementia. That study raises important questions about the reasons for this increased risk and what could be done to reduce it.

The study looks at the health records of 1.7 million New Zealanders born between 1928 and 1967 covering a 30-year period ending in mid-2018. It found that those with a diagnosed mental disorder—such as anxiety disorders, depression or bipolar disorder—had four times the rate of ultimately developing dementia compared with people without such a diagnosis. For those with psychosis such as schizophrenia, it was six times the rate.

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Mental muscle vs adhd, a drug – free approach | LENS Neurofeedback Nyack

Daniel Goleman, noted author of ‘Focus: The Hidden Ingredient in Excellence’ and ‘Emotional Intelligence’, in his New York Times article: ‘Mental Muscle vs ADHD’, suggests that strengthening mental focus, or cognitive control, and mindfulness, may help children suffering with ADHD, and adults with A.D.D.

Research has shown that cognitive control –  impulse management, paying attention or learning readiness, self- regulation –  to be a predictor of success, both in school and work life.

Meditation is a cognitive control exercise that enhances ‘ the ability to self-regulate your internal distractions’ says Dr Adam Gazzelay, neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco. Also, ‘mindfulness seems to flex the brain circuitry for sustaining attention, an indicator of cognitive control’ according to research by Wendy Hasencamp and Lawrence Barselou, Emory University.

Alternative, drug-free therapies, such as Neurofeedback or EEG Biofeedback, by enabling self-regulation of the central nervous system, can , like mindfulness training, also help children with ADHD, and adults with ADD  improve focus and gain cognitive control.

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