The last word: The machine that read my mind

last updated 8 January 2015

Last year, at a family Passover Seder, I heard myself issuing a series of ideologically contradictory, Manischewitz-fueled political pronouncements. If I remember correctly, I called for the immediate invasion of Yemen; the outlawing of Wal-Mart; and the mandatory arming of college professors. I believe I may also have endorsed Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold for president.

My friend Bill Knapp—who is a Democratic political consultant and, as such, a man whose devotion to a coherent set of liberal-centrist policy ideas does not waver, at least in public—suggested that I have my head examined, in order to determine whether I was neurologically wired for liberalism or conservatism. My wife asked, with a disconcerting level of enthusiasm, whether this was actually possible.

“Not only is it possible, but I have the perfect person to do it,” Bill said. He told us that a UCLA neuroscientist named Marco Iacoboni could scan my brain while showing me images of famous politicians. My brain’s response to these pictures, as recorded by a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine, would uncover my actual predispositions by sidestepping the usual inhibition controls that can make focus-group testing unreliable.

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I was hesitant, for two reasons. First, I believed that I already possessed a superior grasp of my brain’s division of labor: 30 percent of my brain is obsessed with the Holocaust; an additional 30 percent worries about my children; 10 percent is reserved for status anxiety; 7 percent, The Sopranos; 4 percent, Kurds; 2 percent, Chinese food; and so on.

The Wire

The Sopranos.

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