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April 21, 2004
Using M.R.I.'s to See Politics on the Brain
Using M.R.I.'s to See Politics on the Brain
- M.R.I. is a political luxury to some folks. Maybe the political enthusiasts of this valuable imaging tool, which is both expensive and not always readily available to most poor and/or underinsured cancer patients in this country.
- To figure out what goes on in our head (our mind and not just our brain), we still need the fully conscious person to talk and tell what he or she feels and thinks. The brave new world in which an M.R.I. can actually let us see a thought or an emotion on a brain scan is still a utopia, no matter how devoutly it might be wished.
- A practical application of this work, and one that would require much more research, would be to determine if the sound bite of an advertisement could possibly swing voters from one political party to another.
I suspect that is as unlikely as a Yankee fan's becoming a Met fan, or vice versa.
The interpretations that the strategists and researchers give to the patterns of brain metabolism on the screen, like Rorschach blots, seem to give more insight into the biases of the testers than into the feelings of the viewer.
- This is democracy? This is Big Brother.
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Posted by gatorlog at April 21, 2004 04:08 PM
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