# Brain Scanning Suggests Activity Patterns Cluster with Ideology
Key Highlights :
The differences between those who lean to opposite ends of the political spectrum are undeniable. But it's intriguing to think that these differences might even show up in brain scans. Using a fairly crude technique, two groups of researchers have now claimed to be able to distinguish the neural responses of left- and right-wingers.
Daantje de Bruin and Oriel FeldmanHall, of Brown University, in Rhode Island, published their study in Science Advances. Noa Katabi and Yaara Yeshurun of Tel Aviv University, in Israel, chose the Journal of Neuroscience. Both used functional magnetic-resonance imaging (fMRI), which measures changes in blood flow as a proxy for neural activity, to look at groups of 44 and 34 volunteers respectively, from across the political spectrum.
Ms de Bruin and Dr FeldmanHall first asked their volunteers to read a list of words—some politically charged, some not—while lying in the scanner. For each word, they recorded activity patterns in the amygdala (which handles aspects of the emotions) and the striatum (which handles aspects of cognition). Neutral words showed no difference. But for words related to “immigration" and “American," the activity patterns in the striatum clustered according to participants’ politics.
Next, they asked people to watch a neutrally worded news clip on abortion and also heated debates on policing and immigration. Patterns of activity stimulated by the news clip were indistinguishable between left- and right-wingers, but those generated by the immigration debate (though, surprisingly, not by the policing debate) clearly divided them.
Ms Katabi and Dr Yeshurun, by contrast, went straight for videos. They asked participants to watch campaign ads and speeches, and a neutral clip. They found differences in the responses to politically charged material of parts of the cortex that deal with vision, hearing and movement. Moreover, unlike Ms de Bruin and Dr FeldmanHall, who merely noted correlations, they said they could predict an individual’s political views from the scan.
Getting someone to lie still in a scanner is a palaver. But surprisingly close results have been achieved with brain scanning. While the technique is still in its infancy, it is clear that activity patterns in the brain can cluster according to political ideology. It is a fascinating area of research that has the potential to uncover more about the differences between left- and right-wingers.
## Title: Brain Scanning Uncovers Activity Patterns Linked to Political Ideology
