Science: The Bigger The Hole In The Head, The More Politically Active

One lesson I’ve worked hard at imparting is that scientists, being generally of slightly above average intelligence, and sometimes more, excel at finding evidence which supports their beliefs. But that single-minded ability comes at a cost: they are often unable see or acknowledge contrary evidence.

Let’s keep this in mind as we examine today’s paper, which was announced in the press with this dramatic headline: “Study uncovers a brain circuit linked to the intensity of political behavior“. (Thanks to Jameson Campaigne for the tip.) Best bits of the story:

People diagnosed with various mental health disorders can sometimes start engaging in intense political behavior, such as violent protests, civil disobedience and the aggressive expression of political views. So far, however, the link between political behavior and the brain has been rarely explored, as it was not viewed as central to the understanding of mental health disorders.

Researchers at Harvard Medical School, Stanford University School of Medicine and Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine recently carried out a study investigating the neural underpinnings of political behavior. Their findings, published in Brain, unveil the existence of a brain circuit that is associated with the intensity of people’s political involvement, irrespective of their ideology or party affiliation…

“As a neuropsychiatrist, I don’t often ask patients about their political behavior, but it could be an important change that occurs in neuropsychiatric disorders,” said Siddiqi. “If we can find a brain target that modulates political behavior, we can figure out how to help patients increase or decrease that behavior.”…

“We used a newer technique called lesion network mapping, which relies on a large-scale wiring diagram of the human brain known as the human connectome. This allows us to link different brain lesions that might be in different parts of the brain, if they all hit a common brain circuit.”

Using these experimental methods, the researchers unveiled a reproducible brain circuit that contributes to political behavior. Rather than influencing people’s political views (i.e., whether one is liberal or conservative), this circuit was found to moderate the intensity of political behavior.

The peer-reviewed paper is “Effects of focal brain damage on political behaviour across different political ideologies” by Shan H Siddiqi and others in Brain.

Before we come to the details, here’s the picture showing the main finding (there is an “Accepted Manuscript” watermark throughout the paper):

They first separated folks on what they call their ideology and their named party affiliation. Then they developed a score they call “Political Intensity”, about which more in a moment. The x-axis is a measure of “FPCN connectivity”, where bigger numbers imply greater injury extents (this is the cross-validation picture, which is the same as the main figure, but this is broken out by affiliation and ideology; there is no important difference between this and their Fig. 2, which groups all together).

You can see the color of the dots. And you can also see the lines with the gray areas. Those lines are their evidence. They say that as connectivity increases, so does political intensity.

The authors are to be commended for including the data, which is not often the case. Those lines look like the fit the data well? No, they don’t. The dots are all over the place, and outside the gray more than inside. But they were able to generate wee Ps with those lines, and as I have told you innumerable times, every use of a P-value is a logical fallacy. Here, too. But the Ps are less than the magic number, and that’s all that counts.

The sample (my emphasis) was “124 male United States military Veterans [who] completed an extensive behavioral testing battery over a five-day period between 2008 and 2012, approximately 40-45 years after sustaining penetrating head trauma. 35 control participants experienced similar combat exposure, but did not sustain a brain injury.”

They asked the men to recall what their political involvement was before their injury, and now, four decades after it. There were only three questions: how interested are you in politics, how much do you follow politics, and how often do you discuss politics. All on a scale of 0 to 4, summed and averaged.

There is no chance this meek attempt at quantifying the unquantifiable can capture even the majority of meaning behind “political intensity”. But it might track crude tones. For instance, if you are 58, the average age of the participants, and looked back before you joined the military at 18 or 19, how would you rate the difference in your political interest then and now? Don’t forget to consider that, if you were like most at 18 and apolitical, that you got shot in the head and have been dealing with the VA for forty years.

And that’s what they found: “we controlled for the participant’s recollection of their pre-lesion behavior”, they say. Remembering pre-injury, both those with head injuries and those with other injuries (the control) were a lot more political at 58 than 18, judging by their score. Roughly a mean score of 1.6 to 3.0 (all this is buried in the Supplemental data). Which I think would be the same for most men on average, even those uninjured and who have never served. Most grow into politics.

Notice they found no difference in party or ideology. Let’s take their word they measured brain connectivity to sufficient accuracy, so that those with greater injuries had more connectivity (though naturally there is error and uncertainty here, too). Who would have greater cause to be political, those with greater injuries or those with lesser?

They missed a big chance to document how great injuries in the controls were, or how much the men in either group had to deal with the VA. It’s not that a brain injury cannot make someone political, who knows. But it’s sure having to deal with the government will. Of course, they cannot show connectivity of controls, because they didn’t have brain injuries.

My judgement is that they have come nowhere close to making their case. The data isn’t really even in the right direction; all is too vague.

Nevertheless, the way science works today, their stated result, stripped of all uncertainty, will join the literature and become a “proved claim”, one that other researchers will call upon to bolster similar claims. We know this because in their discussion they pontificate things like “our results do not necessarily imply that conservatism is driven by cognitive impairment or that liberalism is driven by self-righteous posturing.” And etc. etc.

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