R: Now, let me just be
clear: you couldn't tell whether they
were Republican or Democrats based on whether they gamble, or how they gamble? Or both?
D: On how they gamble. So in this path, you can either take a risk or
not take a risk. In this game, you could
just keep taking the twenty cents every single time if you wanted, and in fact
the way the gambling is set, it wouldn't pay you any different to take that
pure strategy of just taking twenty cents, or every time risking the most. The payoff risk has to be very equal; but
people are going to end up being paid out differently because of taking a risk
in the game.
The gambling behavior doesn't differentiate Republicans and Democrats;
there was just no correlation in the data between party affiliation and the way
that people gamble in this game. So we
wouldn't expect to be able to see Democrats and Republicans differently in
Vegas or Atlantic City.
R: OK. But?
D: But what we were able to see
were (and this was what really surprised us) really big differences in how they
viewed risk. You mentioned these two
brains areas, the amygdala and the insula; and what we found was that the
amygdala was very active for the Republicans when they were doing this
risk-taking path, this gambling path, and the insula was very active for the
[Democrats? -garbled-] when they were doing the same path. So they're doing the same path, they're getting
the same behavior, but the way they're looking at that path and at that
behavior appears to be different between Republicans and Democrats.
R: What does the insula do? We know a bit from what you've told us about
the amygdala; where is the insula, and what is its function?
D: The way that I would think
about it is: if you look at a brain, and you start from kind of the middle of
the neck where the brain stem is, and connecting to the brain, the amygdala is
just [right above? -garbled word(s)-] the brain stem. The insula is a couple of centimeters up and
out a little bit closer toward your ears, and it's in the middle of the brain
that that there is an insula on the left and an insula on the right.
The insula is involved in what they call interoception. This is
basically feeling your internal feelings;
so if you've got a stomachache, you're insula is going to be processing that
information. It integrates the sensory information
that you've got through your body, and allows you to feel your feelings. If I put a hot wire on your arm and I
increased the temperature of it, the amount of insula [activity? -garbled-] is
going to correlate with how hot the wire is on your wrist.
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