A couple of years ago I remarked how embarrassing it must be to be a Republican these days because they appear to be such “colossal pussies”. At the time I was reacting to the latest indignities being foisted upon 99.9% travelers out of fear .1% might be a terrorist. The money spent sniffing shoes and digging through peoples’ underwear at airports quite possibly exceeds the investment made in equipment safety inspection but even one of our commissioners said he would rather be groped at a security checkpoint than risk getting on a plane with a bunch of strangers. A new study indicates that conservatives and liberals utilize their brains very differently and while 60% of individual political ideology is guided by personal experiences, social surroundings and pressures extremists on either side of the spectrum use very different parts of their brains.

Researchers have long wondered if some people can’t help but be an extreme left-winger or right-winger, based on innate biology. To an extent, studies of the brains of self-identified liberals and conservatives have yielded some consistent trends, Schreiber said.

Two of these trends are that liberals tend to have more activity in parts of the brain known as the insula and anterior cingulate cortex. Among other functions, the two regions overlap to an extent by dealing with cognitive conflict, in the insula’s case, while the anterior cingulate cortex helps in processing conflicting information. [10 Things You Didn’t Know About the Brain]

Conservatives, on the other hand, have demonstrated more activity in the amygdala, known as the brain’s “fear center.” “If you see a snake or a picture of a snake, the amygdala will light up — it’s a threat detector,” said Iacoboni.

A study of British subjects earlier this year supported these past imaging studies with measurements of brain structure. The study showed that on average the amygdala is bigger in conservatives, likely indicating greater use of it in neurological processing. In contrast, liberals often possessed larger anterior cingulate cortexes.

Altogether, these findings suggest liberals can more easily tolerate uncertainty, which might be reflected in their shades-of-gray policy positions. In the U.S., those typically include being pro-choice and lenient on illegal immigration.

Conservatives, meanwhile, have a more binary view of threats versus non-threats. Again, such a predisposition could be extended to policy positions, such as being pro-life and stricter on the immigration issue.

Schreiber cautioned, however, that reinforcement of political views might induce the observed phenomena in the brain, rather than the other way around.

Regardless, it is too simple, he said, to chalk up our political ideologies to brain form and function. “The idea that we’re somehow hardwired,” Schreiber said, in regards to our political ideologies, “is totally inadequate.”

In other words, it is conceivable that conservatives are predisposed to be afraid and to make fear based decisions, whereas liberals prefer to properly analyze data to arrive at studied conclusions. We see fear being used as a motivating factor in politics all the time and we have witnessed a lot of it in Coos County. The structure advisory committee is meeting today and while the committee was originally set with a two years term it has escalated its time frame to mere months to make recommendations using a series of scary tactics like claiming the county will soon be insolvent.