Wednesday, June 20, 2012
This Is Your Brain On Fear
A university recently did a survey, the results of which showed that people who watch Fox News exclusively are less informed that their fellow citizens and in the most attention grabbing statistic of all, were less informed than those who reported that they watched no news at all. Pretty shocking. Is the reporting and information dissemination on that network worse than any others? Worse than MSNBC is hard to imagine. And if you flip back and forth between news channels hoping to get something resembling fairness and balance, or even just plain old facts, you will notice that they are often covering the same stories, interviewing the same people, and in some cases if you listen carefully they are using the exact same words and phrases. That one always creeps me out.
So is Fox just the most abysmal news organization or is something else at work? The word "exclusively" for instance? The results of the survey may have more to do with WHO is watching than WHAT they are gathering from the information they receive. What kind of person is willing to get all their information from ONE source? And specifically from a source that arose out of a distrust of other networks. Someone of that mindset may avoid hearing other opinions and be more fearful of people with different views than others. Actually, according to a study at the University College London, conservatives tend to have a larger amygdalas than their liberal friends.
(Amygdala. Yes, yes, I know. Stick with me.)
Since the amygdala is the area of the brain related to survival and it is where we register and process emotions such as fear, anger, pleasure and arousal I can't help but wonder if it is why lots of conservatives seem so angry. It may also explain why so many of those "family values" candidates have such a rough time staving off sex scandals.
What does all this mean? It's fun to sit around and speculate about how being open to new experiences leads us toward liberal thinking and fear leads us to red state consensuses. But it's less fun to imagine what some high stakes results of being wrong on one hand or the other might mean. Can we trust our own judgement? Imagine living in Germany in the thirties and watching Hitler rise to power. Were the fear mongers issuing frantic warnings just paying attention to the primitive parts of their brains? Were those willing to quickly adapt to new ways of thinking, facilitators who swept evil along? In the end history proved that there was much to be afraid of. Indeed few were afraid enough. Or was it the reverse? Were those backing Hitler the ones fearful of what might happen to Germany without radical change? And what part of the brain is it exactly that can accept no more horrific rumors and opts out of reality with the excuse that one is just following orders? Were the demonstrators in Tienanmen Square freedom lovers who were open to new experiences and the fear mongers the defenders of the establishment and human rights violators? The "liberal" view in that case, led those brave protesters to fall on the right side of history, if on the wrong side of cell doors in many cases.
The danger isn't necessarily in the fact that individual minds are pre-wired one way or the other. The danger is that people close them both to rational fears and new experiences. The Founding Fathers, supremely educated, well read, deep thinkers by today's standards (okay, freaking geniuses, by today's standards) embraced both kinds of thinking. It is perfectly reasonable to be afraid of tyranny and totalitarianism. But the courage to create a well thought out form of government, to give the world an ideal of liberty, to embark on the grand adventure of changing the world and to drop a massive cornerstone of history into place required an open mind and the embrace of the new and unknown. They were prepared for the task at hand because they were above all else, rational, reasoned hopeful thinkers. A society can never have too many of those.
They did not assume evil intent on the part of those with a different ideology. As a matter of fact, they trusted each other to the point of pledging their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. They made this pledge though there were fierce differences of opinion on how to bring about a working government and sustain individual liberties far into the future, against the odds.
There is no more brave OLD world. Still, we must press on.
File under: Things to think about.
http://www.westenstrategies.com/pdf/newsweek%20-%20The%20Roots%20of%20Fear%20-%20Dec%2024%202007.pdf
http://www.cell.com/current-biology/retrieve/pii/S0960982211002892
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biology_and_political_orientation
http://theweek.com/article/index/228375/why-you-vote-the-way-you-do
http://www.inquisitr.com/241677/study-fox-news-viewers-less-informed-than-those-who-watch-no-news-at-all/
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