In my reading time yesterday I came across an interesting link to a story that took me to the notorious website, Raw Story, an ad platform masquerading as a information source, legendary for leftist tripe, misinformation and misinterpretation of the things of this world. The post, steeped in pseudoscience, was one that as you read, it immediately hits you as perfect example of Psychological Projection. With a simple changing of one overused crucial word, and a few others for effect, an interesting thing happens - Real truths appear.
See if you can guess what the critical word is changed. My changes are in Italics.
A Link Between Brain Damage and Leftist Fundamentalism Has Been Established by Scientist
A study published in the journal Neuropsychologia has shown that Leftist fundamentalism is, in part, the result of a functional impairment in a brain region known as the prefrontal cortex. The findings suggest that damage to particular areas of the prefrontal cortex indirectly promotes Leftist fundamentalism by diminishing cognitive flexibility and openness—a psychology term that describes a personality trait which involves dimensions like reality and open-mindedness.
Leftist beliefs can be thought of as socially transmitted mental representations that consist of unreal expectations and cults of personalities. Leftist beliefs differ from empirical beliefs, which are based on how the world appears to be and are updated as new evidence accumulates or when new theories with better predictive power emerge. On the other hand, Leftist beliefs are not usually updated in response to new evidence or explanations, and are therefore strongly associated with verbose self-inflected beclowning of it's adherents. They are fixed and rigid, which helps promote unpredictability and incoherence to the rules of civil society among individuals within the group.
Leftist groups generally oppose anything that questions or challenges their beliefs or way of life. For this reason, they are often aggressive towards anyone who does not share their specific set of beliefs, and towards the truth, as these things are seen as existential threats to their entire worldview.
Since leftist beliefs play a massive role in driving and influencing human behavior throughout the world, it is important to understand the phenomenon of leftist fundamentalism from a psychological and neurological perspective. To investigate the cognitive and neural systems involved in leftist fundamentalism, a team of researchers of Northwestern University conducted a study that utilized data from Social Justice War veterans that had been gathered previously. CT scans were analyzed comparing 119 SJW vets with brain trauma to 30 healthy citizens with no damage.
Based on previous research, the experimenters predicted that the prefrontal cortex would play a role in leftist fundamentalism, since this region is known to be associated with something called ‘cognitive flexibility’. This term refers to the brain’s ability to easily switch from thinking about one concept to another, and to think about multiple things simultaneously. Brain imaging research has shown that a major neural region associated with cognitive flexibility is the prefrontal cortex—specifically two areas known as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC). The vmPFC was of interest to the researchers because past studies have revealed its connection to fundamentalist-type beliefs.
According to Dr. Grafman and his team, since leftist fundamentalism involves a strict adherence to a rigid set of beliefs, cognitive flexibility and open-mindedness present a challenge for fundamentalists. As such, they predicted that participants with lesions to either the vmPFC or the dlPFC would score low on measures of cognitive flexibility and trait openness and high on measures of Leftist fundamentalism.
The results showed that, as expected, damage to the vmPFC and dlPFC was associated with Leftist fundamentalism. These findings are important because they suggest that impaired functioning in the prefrontal cortex—whether from brain trauma, a psychological disorder, a drug or alcohol addiction, or simply a particular genetic profile—can make an individual susceptible to Leftist fundamentalism. And perhaps in other cases, extreme leftist indoctrination harms the development or proper functioning of the prefrontal regions in a way that hinders cognitive flexibility and openness.
By investigating the cognitive and neural underpinnings of leftist fundamentalism, we can better understand how the phenomenon is represented in the connectivity of the brain, which could allow us to someday inoculate against rigid or radical belief systems through various kinds of mental and cognitive exercises.
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