Word: brained
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...about the South and about moving to the North. What do you think about the role of the South in the presidential election? The South has always stood for the visceral part of the country. Politics has to address more parts of the body than just the brain and the Democrats have to be reminded of that every time. Obama is cool and cerebral, but I've always thought he is a kind of unifier of the bodily parts of the country because he exudes calm and it doesn't seem like a fake calm. He walks along like...
...what about when the brain goes the other way? What about when racism isn't an unconscious bias you wish you didn't have but a hatred you embrace? It's hard to know how ordinary human brains become so twisted, but the problem may begin with our ability to fathom time...
When Banaji, along with cognitive neuroscientist Liz Phelps of New York University, conducted brain scans of subjects using functional magnetic resonance imaging, they uncovered the reasons for the results. White subjects respond with greater activation of the amygdala--a region that processes alarm--when shown images of black faces than when shown images of white faces. "One of the amygdala's critical functions is fear-conditioning," says Phelps. "You attend to things that are scary because that's essential for survival." Later studies have shown similar results when black subjects look at white faces...
...brain, of course, is not all amygdala, and there are higher regions that can talk sense to the lower ones. Phelps cites studies showing that when blacks and whites are flashed pictures of faces from the other race so quickly that the subjects weren't consciously aware of seeing them, their amygdalae reacted predictably. When the images were flashed more slowly so that subjects could process them consciously, the anterior cingulate cortex and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex--regions that temper automatic responses--kicked...
Phelps conducted other studies in which the images included such friendly faces as Will Smith's and Harrison Ford's and found that this helped control the amygdala too. "The more you think about people as individuals," she says, "the more the brain calms down...