This is your brain on politics

Forget all that debate on whether there are "grandmother neurons" in your brain that house your representations and memories of her. Some are saying there are Hilary Clinton areas, and that John Edwards evokes disgust. A NY Times article came out last week which reports an fMRI study where scientists showed images and video of presidential candidates to swing voters to evaluate the neural responses to images of those candidates before and after watching videos of their speeches. Since then, cognitive neuroscientists, especially those who do imaging studies, have moaned and groaned about the interpretations the authors drew of those blobs of activity, and of the increasing tide of over-simplified imaging studies in pop science. Martha Farah, a neuroscience professor at Penn and poster child for neuroethics, wrote a pretty tactful blog response to the article that is also well worth reading.