This is interesting from today’s Richmond Times-Dispatch by Barticles author A. Bart Hinkle. I believe it applies to all of us to some degree. Mea Culpa. But it also explains the puzzling reference to feminists, MSM, liberals, lefties, anyone not acceptable to conservatives, as liars. Not honorable people with a difference of opinion, but deliberate liars, all. Veracity and integrity would appear to be a conservative trait only. So can we conclude from this example of how our brain works that a coming together of ideology is out of the question? Fraid so.

"---a reminder about the research, mentioned in this space a few times now, by psychologists Drew Western(at Emory University) and Jonas Kaplan (at the University of California).

In experiments using MRI scans, Westen has shown that persons with partisan preferences believe what they want to believe regardless of the facts. Not only that, they unconsciously congradulate themselves--- the reward centers of their brains light up-- when they reject new information that does not square with their predetermined views.  Subjects in Westen’s experiments were presented with contradictory statements by George Bush and John Kerry.  Republicans judged Kerry’s flip-flop harshly, while letting Bush off the hook for his.  Democrats did the reverse.

In his own tests, Kaplan showed images of President Bush and Ssenator John Kerry to political partisans, and measured the changes in parts of the brain regulating emotion.  Under normal conditions, the brain acts to modulate displeasure, as in Aesop’s fable about sour grapes.  (The fox couldn’t reach them, and therefore concluded they must be sour anyway.) By contrast, political partisans display the opposite behavior.  Their brains ratchet up their degree of displeasure when confronted with images of political adversaries. Kaplan found that people jealously guard against anything that might lower their antagonism: “In the political process, people come to decisions early on and then spend the rest of the time making themselves feel good about their decision.”