Health
Ideology May Not Be What You Think but How You’re Wired
So sharp are partisan divisions these days that it can seem as if people are experiencing entirely different realities. Maybe they actually are, according to Leor Zmigrod, a neuroscientist and political psychologist at Cambridge University. In a new book, “The Ideological Brain: The Radical Science of Flexible Thinking,” Dr. Zmigrod explores the emerging evidence that brain physiology and biology help explain not just why people are prone to ideology but how they perceive and share information.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.
What is ideology?
It’s a narrative about how the world works and how it should work. This potentially could be the social world or the natural world. But it’s not just a story: It has really rigid prescriptions for how we should think, how we should act, how we should interact with other people. An ideology condemns any deviation from its prescribed rules.
You write that rigid thinking can be tempting. Why is that?
Ideologies satisfy the need to try to understand the world, to explain it. And they satisfy our need for connection, for community, for just a sense that we belong to something.
There’s also a resource question. Exploring the world is really cognitively expensive, and just exploiting known patterns and rules can seem to be the most efficient strategy. Also, many people argue — and many ideologies will try to tell you — that adhering to rules is the only good way to live and to live morally.
I actually come at it from a different perspective: Ideologies numb our direct experience of the world. They narrow our capacity to adapt to the world, to understand evidence, to distinguish between credible evidence and not credible evidence. Ideologies are rarely, if ever, good.
Q: In the book, you describe research showing that ideological thinkers can be less reliable narrators. Can you explain?
Remarkably, we can observe this effect in children. In the 1940s, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, interviewed hundreds of children and tested their levels of prejudice and authoritarianism, like whether they championed conformity and obedience or play and imagination. When children were told a story about new pupils at a fictional school and asked to recount the story later, there were significant differences in what the most prejudiced children remembered, as opposed to the most liberal children.
Liberal children tended to recall more accurately the ratio of desirable and undesirable traits in the characters of the story; their memories possessed greater fidelity to the story as it was originally told. In contrast, children who scored highly on prejudice strayed from the story; they highlighted or invented undesirable traits for the characters from ethnic minority backgrounds.
So, the memories of the most ideologically-minded children incorporated fictions that confirmed their pre-existing biases. At the same time, there was also a tendency to occasionally parrot single phrases and details, rigidly mimicking the storyteller.
So by “liberal” you mean flexible in thought rather than politically liberal, yes?
Right. The work with children is about prejudice rather than conservatism. Ideologues are strong partisans either to the left or right. Psychological rigidity is linked to ideological extremity regardless of the mission of the ideology.
Are people who are prone to ideology taking in less information? Are they processing it differently?
The people most prone to ideological thinking tend to resist change or nuance of any kind. We can test this with visual and linguistic puzzles. For instance, in one test, we ask them to sort playing cards by various rules, like suit or color. But suddenly they apply the rule and it doesn’t work. That’s because, unbeknownst to them, we changed the rule.
The people who tend to resist ideological thinking are adaptable, and so when there’s evidence the rules have changed, they change their behavior. Ideological thinkers, when they encounter the change, they resist it. They try to apply the old rule even though it doesn’t work anymore.
In one study you conducted, you found that ideologues and nonideologues appear to have fundamental differences in their brains’ reward circuitry. Can you describe your findings?
In my experiments I’ve found that the most rigid thinkers have genetic dispositions related to how dopamine is distributed in their brains.
Rigid thinkers tend to have lower levels of dopamine in their prefrontal cortex and higher levels of dopamine in their striatum, a key midbrain structure in our reward system that controls our rapid instincts. So our psychological vulnerabilities to rigid ideologies may be grounded in biological differences.
In fact, we find that people with different ideologies have differences in the physical structure and function of their brains. This is especially pronounced in brain networks responsible for reward, emotion processing, and monitoring when we make errors.
For instance, the size of our amygdala — the almond-shaped structure that governs the processing of emotions, especially negatively tinged emotions such as fear, anger, disgust, danger and threat — is linked to whether we hold more conservative ideologies that justify traditions and the status quo.
What do you make of this?
Some scientists have interpreted these findings as reflecting a natural affinity between the function of the amygdala and the function of conservative ideologies. Both revolve around vigilant reactions to threats and the fear of being overpowered.
But why is the amygdala larger in conservatives? Do people with a larger amygdala gravitate toward more conservative ideologies because their amygdala is already structured in a way that is more receptive to the negative emotions that conservatism elicits? Or can immersion in a certain ideology alter our emotional biochemistry in a way that leads to structural brain changes?
The ambiguity around these results reflects a chicken-and-egg problem: Do our brains determine our politics, or can ideologies change our brains?
If we’re wired a certain way, can we change?
You have agency to choose how passionately you adopt these ideologies or what you reject or what you don’t.
I think we all can shift in terms of our flexibility. It’s obviously harder for people who have genetic or biological vulnerabilities toward rigid thinking, but that doesn’t mean that it’s predetermined or impossible to change.
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Study finds link between obesity and vascular dementia
Fox News senior medical analyst Dr. Marc Siegel joins ‘America’s Newsroom’ to discuss an increase in colon cancer in people under 50 despite an overall lowering cancer deaths and a new study linking obesity to vascular dementia.
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A new blood test could determine a woman’s dementia risk as early as 25 years before symptoms emerge.
That’s according to new research from the University of California San Diego, which found that a specific biomarker protein associated with early pathological processes of Alzheimer’s disease was “strongly linked” to future dementia risk.
The researchers analyzed blood samples from 2,766 participants in the Women’s Health Initiative Memory Study in the late 1990s, according to the study’s press release.
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The women ranged from 65 to 79 years of age and showed no signs of cognitive decline at the start of the study.
After tracking the participants for up to 25 years, the researchers concluded that the biomarker phosphorylated tau 217 (p-tau217) was “strongly associated” with future mild cognitive impairment and dementia.
A new blood test could determine a woman’s dementia risk as early as 25 years before symptoms emerge. (iStock)
Women who had higher levels of p-tau217 at the beginning of the study were “much more likely” to develop the disease. The findings were published today in JAMA Network Open.
“The key takeaway is that our study suggests it may be possible to detect risk of dementia two decades in advance using a simple blood test in older women,” first author Aladdin H. Shadyab, a UC San Diego associate professor of public health and medicine, told Fox News Digital.
“These biomarkers may help us identify who is at greatest risk and develop strategies to delay or prevent dementia.”
“Our findings show that the blood biomarker p-tau217 could help identify individuals at higher risk for dementia long before symptoms begin,” he added.
This long lead time could open the door to earlier prevention strategies and more targeted monitoring, rather than waiting until memory problems are already affecting daily life, according to Shadyab.
A specific biomarker protein associated with early pathological processes of Alzheimer’s disease was “strongly linked” to future dementia risk. (iStock)
“As the research advances, these biomarkers may help us identify who is at greatest risk and develop strategies to delay or prevent dementia,” he said.
This risk relationship wasn’t the same across the board, however. Women over 70 with higher p-tau217 levels had “poorer cognitive outcomes” compared to those under 70, as did those with the APOE ε4 gene, which is a known risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease.
The study also found that p-tau217 was a stronger predictor of dementia in women who were randomly assigned to receive estrogen and progestin hormone therapy compared to those who received a placebo.
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“Blood-based biomarkers like p-tau217 are especially promising because they are far less invasive and potentially more accessible than brain imaging or spinal fluid tests,” said senior author Linda K. McEvoy, senior investigator at Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute and professor emeritus at the Herbert Wertheim School of Public Health, in the release.
“Blood-based biomarkers like p-tau217 are especially promising because they are far less invasive and potentially more accessible than brain imaging or spinal fluid tests,” a researcher said. (iStock)
“This is important for accelerating research into the factors that affect the risk of dementia and for evaluating strategies that may reduce risk.”
Blood tests for Alzheimer’s disease are still being studied and are not recommended for routine screening in people without symptoms, Shadyab noted.
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More research is needed before this approach can be considered for clinical use prior to cognitive symptoms.
Future studies should investigate how other factors — like genetics, hormone therapy and age-related medical conditions — might interact with plasma p-tau217, the researchers added.
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“The study examined only older women, so the findings may not necessarily apply to men or younger populations,” Shadyab noted. “We also examined overall dementia outcomes rather than specific subtypes such as Alzheimer’s disease.”
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For women over 60, muscle strength plays a critical role in longevity, a new study confirms.
Researchers at the University at Buffalo, New York, followed more than 5,000 women between the ages of 63 and 99, finding that those with greater muscle strength had a significantly lower risk of death over an eight-year period.
The findings were published in JAMA Network Open.
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Muscle function was measured using grip strength and how quickly participants could complete five unassisted sit-to-stand chair raises.
These are two tests commonly used in clinical settings to evaluate muscle function in older adults, the researchers noted.
A recent study shows that stronger muscle strength in women over 60 is linked to a lower risk of death over eight years. (iStock)
“In a community cohort of ambulatory older women, muscular strength was associated with significantly lower mortality rates, even when we accounted for usual physical activity and sedentary time measured using a wearable monitor, gait speed and blood C-reactive protein levels,” study lead author Michael LaMonte, research professor of epidemiology and environmental health at the University at Buffalo, told Fox News Digital.
“Movement is the key — just move more and sit less.”
Many earlier studies did not include those objective measurements, making it difficult to determine whether muscle strength itself was linked to longevity, according to LaMonte. “Our study was able to better isolate the association between strength and death in later life,” he added.
Even for women who don’t get the recommended amount of aerobic physical activity, which is at least 150 minutes per week, muscle strength remained important for longevity, the researchers found.
Women with greater muscle strength were more likely to live longer, even if they did not meet the recommended amount of aerobic exercise. (iStock)
“The findings of lower mortality in those who had higher strength but were not meeting current national guidelines on aerobic activity were somewhat intriguing,” LaMonte said.
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Federal guidelines recommend strengthening activities one to two days per week, targeting major muscle groups.
Resistance training does not have to require a gym membership, LaMonte noted. These exercises can be performed using free weights, resistance bands, bodyweight movements or even household items, such as soup cans.
Experts recommend working major muscle groups one or two days a week using weights, bands or bodyweight exercises. (iStock)
“Movement is the key — just move more and sit less,” he said. “When we can no longer get out of the chair and move around, we are in trouble.”
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LaMonte acknowledged several limitations of the study. The researchers assessed muscle strength in older age but did not explore how earlier levels in adulthood might influence long-term health outcomes.
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“We were not able to understand how strength and mortality relate in younger ages,” he said, noting that future research should explore whether building strength earlier could have an even greater impact on longevity.
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