Cere-bedlam

Research suggests conservatives have brains like misshapen vegetables. How wonky is yours?

On a shelf at home I have a little porcelain head, about four inches tall. The face is featureless, but the skull itself is criss-crossed by several thin lines. Inside the lines, and along them, are written many different words. Words like ‘acquisitiveness’, ‘benevolence’, ‘combativeness ’, ‘firmness’ and ‘hope’.

The head looks old fashioned but it is not an antique. It’s just a trinket, the sort of bric a brac you can pick up in Camden Market for a few quid after you’ve spent the rest of your money on bubble tea, and joints made out of bus seat stuffing.

The head is just a bit of fun. A throwback to an earlier time in Victorian England (boo hiss) when some people believed that it was possible to divine the character of a human being by feeling the bumps, ridges and contusions on their head.

The idea was that a bump here, say over the ear, corresponded with a propensity to violence. While a dip at the crown might mark you out as a romantic. And the shape of your forehead might indicate you are forthright, or timorous.

Phrenology was developed by a German called Franz Joseph Gall in the late 1700s and promoted as a ‘scientific’ method of finding out if a person had a predisposition to indulge in such anti social activities as theft, drunkenness, or licentiousness. Or perhaps a skull had the topography indicative of positive traits, like honesty, loyalty, and decency instead.

In short, within the rigid morality of Victorian society, here was a handy method of scientifically separating the good people, from the bad people.

But though it focused on human skulls, it was actually absolute bollocks.

Phrenology is a pseudoscience. As a method of predicting a person’s future actions phrenology is right up there with astrology, tarot cards or cracking open a fortune cookie. In fact it’s about as accurate a way of spotting a future tea leaf, as reading tea leafs.

And just like like palm reading, or getting a prediction from The Office of Budget Responsibility, it is mostly nothing more than a bit of harmless fun, which shouldn’t be taken too seriously.

But Phrenology also had a sinister edge. Because it claimed the things it ‘revealed’ about human beings were ‘scientific’ it was sometimes used as a justification for some very nasty racism.

The racists claimed that some ethnic groups tended to have heads shaped in a certain way. And then guess what? They associated this particular shape with low morals and poor intelligence. Therefore ‘proving’ that the ethnic group had low morals and poor intelligence. It was a circular and obviously bogus idea. But that was it anyway, in a racist nutshell.

Similarly, a quick rub of the head could ‘prove’ that women were no good at arts, or science, or generally thinking about stuff.

Essentially Phrenology was nonsense, but served as a valuable tool for anyone minded to wrap up their prejudices in a veneer of scientific respectability.

Fortunately such pseudoscientific clap trap has been suitably debunked, disapproved of, and dumped in the dustbin of history. Even most Victorians didn’t really believe in it. I mean these people clearly weren’t idiots. Check out some of their bridges.

But if two years of needlessly destructive and harmful lockdowns have taught us anything, apart from the fact that Welsh First Minister Mark Drakeford should not be trusted with anything sharper than a bag of Flumps, it is that science can be used as a justification for pretty much anything.

Whether that’s keeping people locked up in their homes. Denying kids their education. Arresting people for sitting on benches. Shutting down a health service. Or making toddlers wear face masks. (Still shudder).

Which is why I took more than a little interest in a new scientific study from an American university which claims to show that liberals and conservatives are actually hard wired to think differently from each other.

According to the research, our perspectives on the world, and our political values, might not be formed just because our opinions, upbringing, or life experiences, are different, but also thanks to the differing shapes and sizes of the parts of our actual human brains, like the amygdala and the anterior cingulate.

According to the study, the way our brains have actually been constructed, the bumps and the ridges and contusions if you will, may help determine the facets that make up our personalities, including our personal politics.

There seems to be a correlation between each person’s brain shape and their outlook on life. And so, it would seem, that by analysing our individual lumps and bumps, a suitably qualified brain boffin could learn an awful lot about someone.

It’s not a entirely new research. I’ve read about similar studies before. And why not? It’s fun for a newspaper to look into what scientists are messing about with in their labs and blowing it up into a readable news story.

This latest study just takes lots of previous research and ties it up in a bow.

And it’s pretty damning stuff.

The article is pretty clear that The Science has pinpointed exactly where the moral bulges, lumps, and grooves lie in the modern human brain.

The brain researchers claim that ‘conservative’ brains are more negative, prone to fear responses, and are generally cowardly and paranoid.

While the attributes the researchers associate with liberal thinkers, include the areas associated with emotional intelligence, social skills and bravery.

It’s pretty clear cut.

I mean obviously, this is brain surgery, it’s not rocket science.

And if that still seems a bit too nuanced, here’s another way of looking at it. The scientists have used Science to scientifically separate humans into distinct scientific groups according to the scientific shapes of their brains.

People who tend to go to university, like most scientists, or have liberal views, like most scientists, or who work in jobs that are funded by the state, like most scientists have generally got nice, friendly shaped amygdalas. We could delineate this group as composing of people with ‘good brains ’.

While lots of the sort of people who have what could be considered ‘traditional’ values, aren’t funded by the state, and who complain that so much of their wages are going to subsidise those who do, are generally to be found in the other group. They are the ones with brains shaped liked those unappealing oddly shaped vegetables, that get left behind, unloved, in the fruit and veg department of the supermarket.  We could perhaps conclude that these are the people with ‘bad brains.’

Now obviously its not as simple as that. These scientists are probably super nice people with balanced views and I’m obviously exaggerating what has been said to make a point.

But you’d have to believe in a pretty deterministic universe if you think you could engineer a person’s personality by adjusting specific sliders governing the size and shape of bits of their brain. Like the character creator on some video game rpg.

The danger is that if we took studies like this to their logical conclusion, we could end up inevitably medicalising ‘wrong think.’

And it’s probably not very good for society if we get to a point where one explanation for heterodox thinkers is that their brains have been wired up incorrectly.

In fact it’s an idea that has a less than stellar history.

Women in the 1700s and 1800s who who were overly vocal in their discontent were sometimes branded hysterical and dumped in asylums.

And it wasn’t that long ago at all when gay people were considered to be afflicted by some malady and sometimes given shock therapy to jolt them out of falling in love and lust with the wrong people.

And of course in other societies, in the past, panels of experts, would sometimes decide that people had incorrectly functioning brains, mainly because they had spent too long ruminating on dark unacceptable thoughts, and so ordered those people to attend re education camps.

And by ‘other societies’. I mean ‘Canada’. And by ‘the past’ I mean ‘last year’. Because that’s when Dr Jordan Peterson was ordered by the College of Psychologists of Ontario to undergo a  six month ‘coaching programme’ to have his thoughts ‘appropriately remediated in the public interest.’

Now you might not be a fan of Dr Peterson and that’s fair enough. And he has, it must be admitted,  brought much of this upon himself by complaining that he didn’t find fat models in Sports Illustrated attractive, and by openly criticising the world’s premiere occasionally black faced national leader, Justin Trudeau. So he is a bit of an outlier, and so maybe, not a good example.

I’m not for a moment suggesting that regular people are about to be forced through MRI scans to find out if their brains have gone wonky.

Because there’s absolutely no need for all that hi tech equipment.

Why bother putting someone through a brain scan to check for cranial aberration when it’s far quicker and cheaper to just look at their Twitter feed,  ask who they voted for, or check if they have an England flag flying from their council house? (Shout out to Lady Nugee) Because if people exhibit the traits associated with broken brains, maybe it’s not too much of a leap to assume, their brains are broken.

Of course it very soon becomes a circular argument.

You can define a ‘conservative’ as someone who worries about the direction and pace of change in society.

Or perhaps you can define someone whose broken brain makes them susceptible to fear, paranoia and irrationality, as a ‘conservative’.

Similarly, most decent people might feel morally obliged to consider the viewpoint of the first type of ‘conservative’ as legitimate.  You might concede that their opinions, life experiences and perspectives are valid, even if you personally don’t agree with their politics.

The second type of conservative, well their brain is wonky, so not so much.

It’s so much easier to justify ignoring someone when you don’t just believe their mind is malfunctioning, but you have the actual brain scans to prove it.

It’s the liberal elites equivalent of a mum, who excuses her unruly child’s awful behaviour by cocking her head to one side and saying with a sad smile, ‘He’s tired.’

Because it isn’t actually our fault when we don’t believe what the ruling elite tell us. We just need a nice lie down.

Maybe there really is a faulty bit in my brain that is creeping around inside my skull at night. Whispering darkly that surely the person best placed to wisely spend the money I’ve worked hard to earn, is me. And not actually glassy eyed wooden top Jeremy Hunt. Maybe.

Maybe there is an insidious brain disorder which makes sufferers needlessly fearful of their government and distrusting of its intentions.

Or perhaps, people have a justification in being scared, paranoid and negative because the thing they fear, the steady erosion of their personal freedoms, and financial security at the hands of an unaccountable elite who are systematically lying to them, is actually happening.

It’s like chiding the little kid on the lilo in Jaws for being scared of sharks.

I worry that at some level we are at risk of reducing complex moral arguments, and nuanced personal perspectives to aspects of biology. That we are in danger of allowing our bosses to redefine inconvenient opinions as physical deficiencies which need addressing through some kind of remedial action.

It’s happened before, in Mao’s China, the Soviet Union, as well as Vietnam, Cambodia and of course modern day China too. So without turning into the paranoid conspiracy theorists they like to portray all dissenters to be, let’s be wary that a version of the idea that ‘you don’t trust the ruling elite, you must be ill’ doesn’t also happen here.

I don’t know where this leaves me. Maybe I’ve simply read too much into a fun story, that was just filling space in a newspaper. Maybe I’m attempting to choose for myself, free will over determinism. (Yes. I’m aware of the irony of that statement.)  Maybe I’m actually a conservative. Or maybe, just maybe I’m  suffering from a bump on the head.

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I’ll reply in kind to any good faith comments so tell me what you think. Am I just being paranoid? Have I read too much into this story? Or do you think there’s something in it?

Thanks!