The last word: The machine that read my mind
MRIs are now being used to figure out why we buy what we buy and vote the way we do. When Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic tested his own inner wiring, the results left him scratching his head.
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.
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