Your brains response to disgust can predict your political worldview, says new study

As Fox News front woman Megan Kelly found out Monday on national TV, if you ask an Ebola medic tough questions, you should be prepared to handle any answer. Our physical and mental response to disgust in this instance the finer points of a three-gallon-per-day case of diarrhea is something one might think to be universal and uniform across our species. Researchers led by Read Montagueat Virginia Tech have just made the claim that if they analyzeyour brain with an MRI scannerwhile you view an image of disgust, their algorithm can classify you as liberal or conservative to a 95% confidence level.

Recent studies reporting that dreams or other mental imagery can now be decoded may not have impressed everyone, but we do know that brain imaging especially with functional MRI (fMRI) is getting more powerful all the time. The question is, is it now good enough to take a look at you in action and know your very core not just the crust of our sometimes fickle worldview, but the most visceral intuitions from which they derive?

The researchers scanned some 80 people, enough to show they werent playing games. After the subjects viewed all manner of threatening, disgusting, or pleasant pictures, their brain activity wasfed into a predictive model which classified them as conservative or liberal. This model applied machine learning techniques to the data, including a type of penalized regression method known as an elastic net algorithm. The results were then compared to the subjects self-evaluations of their own political leanings. [Research paper: DOI10.1016/j.cub.2014.09.050]

The researchers found that of all the images shown to the subjects, those which evoked disgust gave the biggest effects. From that class of images, one particular depiction, one showing decaying animal remains, clearly differentiated the subjects. The subjects that self-reported conservative on the evaluations had a significantly greater neural response to this image, particularly in certain region of the brain like the basal ganglia.

Read:Real-time emotion detection with Google Glass: An awesome, creepy taste of the future of wearable computers

Implicating any large brain area in personal idiosyncrasy from imaging data can be a tricky affair. For example, when early investigators of synesthesia (a condition that includes significant merging of different sensory perceptions) differential activation of the basal ganglia versus the cortex was reported. As more subjects were studied however, these kinds of sweeping conclusions proved difficult to corroborate.

The question remains as to what exactly thesescans are picking up on. For example, are they merely picking up on subthreshold motor plans to activate the muscular intimations of disgust? In other words, signals that if fully realized would wrinkle the nose and pull the corners of the mouth down in the near-universally recognized face of disgust? We reported previously on one technology, Motorolas smart tattoo, that might have the power to address these kinds of questions.

This electronic tattoo was originally designed to record subthreshold signals of your inner voice from a skin location near your throat. It would not be too hard to apply devices like these to the facial muscles as well, and listen in to covert political views. Clearly a simple label of conservative or liberal can not do justice to the full nuance and complexity of any individuals views. The potential role, if any, of physiologically-defined variables in politics still remains to be seen. To that point, we just reported on the political ambitions of the Transhumanist Party. Its proponents offer that our worldviews are actually partitioned at an even deeper level than the current parties pedal namely to either have the desire to persist indefinitely as technologically transformed individuals in a state of ever-increasing capability, or to have the desire to fight against those that do.

Now read:Human emotions mapped for the first time, shows where we feel love, fear, and shame

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Your brains response to disgust can predict your political worldview, says new study