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General News    H2'ed 3/29/13

Transcript: Neuropolitics-- Brain Studies That Differentiate Political Party Preference

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So dinosaurs, for instance, have massive bodies, like the brontosaurus (which is not what the dinosaur people call them anymore, but), those huge dinosaurs, remember, from learning about in childhood, had brains that were trivially small, the size of a walnut.  Now you could run a giant dinosaur on a brain that's the size of a walnut because it doesn't really require that much computational power.  An elephant, by contrast, the largest land animal that's around now, it has a huge brain; but that huge brain is not devoted to running the big old elephant, it's really because elephants also are political animals.  They form coalitions, they have social structures that change in our dynamic, just like humans, and that requires a lot of mental effort. 

 

This mental capacity for forming coalitions is what our national politics of the 21srt century relies on.  But the brain evolved for politics, this tribal politics that has been around for a very, very long time, even before we had tribes that we would recognize as humans.  When we see these superpods in dolphins, it's a parallel kind of evolutionary strategy that has developed.

 

Rob Kall:   So, you're talking about politics like, "Who's turn it is to do the dishes," or "Whose turn it is to hunt for the mastodon," eh?

 

Darren Schreiber:   Exactly.  The term that anthropologists use for this is called "Everyday Politics."  The politics of the office, of the church, of the communities, of the family - all of those are examples of politics.  I take sports as an example: as a former Philadelphia resident myself, people are very frequently talking about politics in sports.  When I hear a bunch of guys at a local bar in Philly just sitting around talking about sports -- me, as a political scientist, I'm hearing them as if they're talking about politics.  Coalition memberships; which team do they like better, why do they like them better?  How are they connected with each other?  And that tension that we find there is really a modem manifestation of this ability we have to think as political animals. 

 

Aristotle got it right a couple thousand years back:  "Man is by nature a political animal."  And it comes out in all these different ways: whether it's talking about sports, whether it's talking about the dynamics of who's going to do dinner tonight, whose going to do the dishes, and all of that constant coalitional navigation and negotiation that we're doing is using the political brain, that's how we can do it.  It's because we have this brain built for politics.

 

Rob Kall:   OK.  You use one word, and I just want to get really clear about it.  You talk about the word "coalition" as a major part of your model.  So could you define it, talk about that a little bit, what that means?

 

Darren Schreiber:    Yes.  So one of the things that's incredibly fascinating that psychologists have described is what they call the "Minimum Coalition Model."  Very simply, if you get three people together, and you give two of them blue stickers and the third one a red sticker, just that minimal level of an intervention, is enough to get the people who get the blue sticker to act together against the person who has the red sticker.  We have this tendency as humans to cooperate on any dimension that we can see as being salient, as being something that will help us to build a friendship. 

 

If I say, "Hey, you've got a blue sticker, I've got a blue sticker.  Let's go after that third person who has got the red sticker," that's as trivial of an indicator - even as random as it is, that psychologists just assigned the colors randomly - it doesn't matter.  People will team up and engage in beneficial relationships with that person that just happens to have the same kind of sticker as we do.  What's also fascinating about this experiment, though, is that not only are we building a coalition based on something as trivial as a sticker, but also based on that trivial sticker, we're changing all of the other coalitions that people would also be members of.  So, I might be White, he might be Black, and yet a simple of a manipulation as giving somebody a sticker can get them to work together to benefit that group.  So, we change group membership really, really quickly.  Shockingly quickly, in fact.

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Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect, connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.

Check out his platform at RobKall.com

He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity

He's given talks and workshops to Fortune 500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful people on his Bottom Up Radio Show, and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and opinion sites, OpEdNews.com

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Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, (more...)
 

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