The current political turnover in America happens to coincide with a deep dive that I am doing on neuroscience partially due to a book I am writing and partially because it is simply fascinating to study how we think and come to believe certain things. I will share some of this information here because, if you are like me and view different news channels each day, you may actually question if the reporters are from different countries due to the seemingly incongruent coverage of what are ostensibly the same exact events. They are not from different countries but, as it turns out, they actually have different brains or, at least, their brains have different structures and chemistries that are influencing how they see the world. The American Journal of Political Science published an article entitled “Correlation not Causation” in 2002 that measured the relationship between political ideology and personality types. The researchers from Virginia Commonwealth University felt that they would find “High “P” values in the conservative group, with “P” representing a cluster of behaviors that make up this personality type. The “High-P” personality grouping includes such features as a tendency to be manipulative, tough minded and a drive to be authoritarian with demonstrations of risk taking, sensation seeking, and impulsivity.1,2
And, probably because they were looking for the “High P” group to associate with conservatism, possibly because the “Low P” group were typified as being more generous and altruistic with a tendency to be well socialized and empathetic, the researchers published findings matched their initial impressions and they labeled those with “High P” features as “conservative” and those with “Low P” features as “liberal.”1 But this labeling convention simply did not correlate with other research in this area over the next several years and so, 14 years after it had published the article, the American Journal of Political Science issued a retraction because the findings about the groups were exactly reversed. The new categorization in the retraction matches what is becoming a mountain of other research in this area and the article states that, “[f]irst, opposite our expectations, higher Ρ scores correlate with more liberal military attitudes and more socially liberal beliefs for both females and males.”2
It is important to note here that the “P” factor stands for “Psychoticism” and persons with high levels of it are more prone to madness and mental ills of many kinds, but specifically are more prone to the development of both schizophrenia and bi-polar disorder. The study of large groups results in a broad generalization of course, but it is clear that those with personalities that are associated with “High P” levels are also typically the most creative amongst us and many become academics, entrepreneurs, or artists and, if their individual developmental environment is also rife with choices and differences of opinions, they tend to generally gravitate towards a liberal ideology. In a large study of a relatively isolated population (i.e. Iceland) researchers found “that creativity, conferred, at least in part, by common genetic variants, comes with an increased risk of psychiatric disorders conferred by the same genetic variants.”3 In fact, the brain structure of liberals versus conservatives has been a frequent focus of study in the past few decades as people have become more polarized and dogmatic about the way that they see the world through their preferred political lens. Interestingly enough a large Swedish study found that “[t]he relatives of the academics had significantly increased risk of suffering from schizophrenia or bipolar disorder”4 and so it is also demonstrably true that the academic world fills most of their ivory tower tenured positions with professors whom largely identify as being politically liberal.
Therefore, the tendency for the underlying structure and chemical processing of some brains to produce more liberal ideations about the world around them than others is well established. It has also been shown that these beliefs can be modified through the administration of drugs that increase the Serotonin in the brain and depress Dopamine uptake (e.g. those routinely used to treat depression) in Dopaminergic persons (i.e. persons with more Dopamine receptors and greater Dopamine activity in their brains) so that the liberal persons response to these drugs is to demonstrably think and behave in a more conservative fashion. To restate that in a more succinct fashion: since the person with more Dopamine receptors will tend to have a Higher P score and generally exhibit more liberal tendencies if given a certain developmental environment in their formative years, the liberal minded person will also, over time, modify their positions to a more conservative mindset if they are given drugs that limit the uptake of Dopamine in some way. This should make it clear that our dogmatic political opinions are in fact more the result of cloudy chemical lenses on top of our already rose-colored glasses and are not the result of either divine revelation or superior intelligence.1 I make this next statement as much for myself as for any reader of this article:
Be careful with thou dogmas, O mortal, chemicals cloud your judgment!
When I was in Sweden we were discussing certain political decisions made by the Swedish government and a Swedish Officer told me that, when a person is too idealistic and not grounded in objective reality with their ideas, the Swedes will say that "your eyes are too blue on this point." This is a way of saying that you are thinking too much like a Swede and, for what may be an international or multi-dimensional problem set, you should be careful projecting such a limited perspective because the world does not think the same way . All of us tend to look at the problems of this world through the lenses developed by our environment and chemical processes, and that might not translate well when you are projecting onto global problems and other groups characteristics that are inherently limited by your own historical exposures. We might adopt this and say to one another "I think that your brain is too blue on this point" or "I think your brain is too red on this issue" because our brains, in trying to make sense of the complex world around us, tend to oversimplify the problems and we default to the components of reality that our brain chemistry feels is most important, whether this is objectively true and accurate or not. So, whether your brain activity is primarily influenced through chemicals like Serotonin and other endorphins, or if it is mainly Dopaminergic in nature and you have more Dopamine receptor cells and activity, having more or less of specific gene expressions does in fact make groups of people from this globe behave and think either more conservative and concrete or more liberal and abstract.
One specific example from The Molecule of More1 shows that the D4 gene which codes for Dopamine receptors in the brain, and its variant the 7R allele, have demonstrated to researchers that the more 7R you have the more novelty seeking, impulsive, fickle, excitable, quick tempered, extravagant, and exploratory you will behave. This is because you can use more Dopamine molecules to influence brain cell activity and therefore you will be more prone to focus on the newest and most “progressive” ideas and inherently you will pursue more abstract ideals and potentially become left leaning in the political sense as well. The Dopamine molecule and the availability of receptor sites for Dopamine in the desire circuits are what drive us to pursue new, novel, and unusual things, and can become out of balance driving people to continually seek new and more novel thrills. And this most often also correlates to persons in artistic professions whom experience higher divorce rates and even certain mental illnesses at a higher rate than other populations.3
Comparatively, people with lower amounts of the 7R gene expression tend to be more reflective, rigid, loyal, slow tempered, stoic, and frugal in nature. These persons are more prone to thinking and voting with a more conservative mindset and their more Serotonin driven system is the opposite of Dopamine driven ones making them more empathetic towards the concerns of people in their community as they tend to be more altruistic. Conservative persons tend to prefer to personally give to others in a direct way rather than through the utilization of big government programs that will somehow “solve” the ills of humankind through education and other means like their liberal counterparts, who tend to prefer solving problems at a certain distance from the people in need in order to avoid personal interactions just as the dopamine in their brains prefers. Surveys of itemized tax records show that, in persons whom itemize on their taxes, conservative voters give in much more altruistic ways as a component of concrete thinking where they believe that they can, and should, actually assist their fellow humans personally, while the more Dopaminergic and liberal voters want either the government or education, and ostensibly both, to provide aid to others and eventually fix the entirety of humanity so their individual charitable giving is much lower.1
The high 7R brains have more tightly packed Dopamine receptor arrays in their brains as discussed recently by the Institute of Psychology in London, where the stronger Dopamine signals due to the densely packed receptor sites was also associated with liberal political thinking globally.1 Dopamine can make people more creative (e.g. actors, artists, academics, and even tech and other entrepreneurs) while also making them think in a more progressive ways because the desire to pursue anything new is propagated by Dopamine. But this can lead to the delusion that they can, and even will, and in fact, MUST save the world in some grandiose, yet quite possibly completely impractical and possibly hazardous way even while sometimes actually creating something with global impact for better or worse (author’s opinion). The same Dopamine that makes someone a great mathematician who can wrestle with complex abstractions which may eventually create practical quantum computing or other key scientific breakthroughs, also makes them less satisfied with the way things are right now and can drive them to constantly pursue the newness of change and anything unusual, or non-status quo, as a general rule when they engage the world around them. In the same way that Dopaminergic thinking can be creative and allow people to make beautiful art and enable creative advances in technology, and even sometimes, allow mere mortals to write beautiful words . . . (or did until the progressive academics killed both the form and function of poetry in the pursuit of new and abstract writing styles, elevating the currently unsatisfying, and often formless, word groups that get read by less and less people each year as the epitome of poetic expression, while throwing every well metered and symmetrically beautiful Shakespearean effort into the garbage), elevated dopamine levels can also be used to hold onto:
“a false belief or judgment about external reality, held despite incontrovertible evidence to the contrary,”
This is, of course, the definition of the word “delusion” that I deliberately used earlier and of which we should all be more aware, especially since the definition concludes with the following:“as a symptom of serious mental illness.” 5
I was once personally told by a neuroscience researcher that at least “20-30% of the people from any given population are actively experiencing delusions.”6 I asked him to unpack that statement, and he said that by delusion he meant that the delusional people are actively experiencing, and even pursuing, a reality markedly different than the objectively quantifiable one everyone else is experiencing. Think of that number and then think of how easily brain chemistry, and your brain specifically, can trick you into either seeing or focusing on something that is not real and not true just because it is new. This happens a lot under survival stress where people may perform some programmed response in response to the threat that objectively does not make sense under their present circumstances (e.g. pack behavior, flight, freezing, etc.,), as their brains attempt to shut out certain aspects of a hazardous reality that is unfamiliar to them. Brains under stress will turn the “pages” of perceived reality like it is a rolodex, trying to find a picture that fits the situation in order to make sense of something that it has never experienced before and, as a result, the person under extreme stress may believe the things that their brains are telling them which are imprecise snippets of objective reality and, sometimes, even wholly untrue. His research was actually focused on predicting and improving reactions under stress in military groups, and his finding that delusional people were also present in the global military in larger numbers than you would think, but not as large as the general population, was confirmed. I have personally experienced the dissonance between objective reality and what my brain told me was true so perhaps I will unpack that further in the future and until then let's just agree that it is not your heart that lies to you and cause you harm, but it is your brain.
So, even if my reference to this stress reaction researcher's research is anecdotal at best, my view is now that these data on dopaminergic thinking being future focused and abstract helps indicate a basis for some of the liberal ideations which led to dangerous and consequential choices that have turned a recent fiery red outcome in a very blue state into an apocalypse. In the modern world having an opinion and aligning oneself with online opinion groups so that outlier opinions cannot get into one’s own carefully constructed thought silo has become, in essence, a commonplace commitment to the creation of imaginary worlds. I say this not as a condemnation either for all users of social media or for dopaminergic persons, because I certainly can be both of these to varying degrees, but rather for the purpose of illuminating a problem: if you are excessively dopaminergic in nature and are always pursuing the new and the abstract, and you convince yourself that your individual ideations are the only way to better or save humanity as a whole, you may also miss the clear signs in this objective reality that lead to disaster for yourself and the other humans in your proximity.7
I work to know my brain and how it functions and I have good reason to do so, but so do you and therefore, you should do the work to at least know how your own brain works so that you can be prepared when it trips you up and tries to prioritize fantasy future outcomes over present objective realities. I still firmly believe that the objective truth is accessible and that it matters, and also that nowhere is the need for truth seekers greater than in our nation right now. But we must all endeavor to seek the actual objective truth rather than some perception of it overly influenced by social media suggestive persuasion and our own very specific brain chemistry. If you are absolutely convinced of something in spite of valid information to the contrary, you may be experiencing a delusional episode rather than having a divine revelation so perhaps proceed with non-dogmatic caution whenever your conviction levels exceed 80%. And if you really want to be counter-culture and resist something of merit, the most disruptive thing that you could do in this climate is to show some grace and respect to the brains and personhood of those with whom you, and your brain chemistries, currently disagree.
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1. Liberman, Daniel Z. and Long, Michael E., “The Molecule of More: How a Single Chemical in Your Brain Drives Love, Sex, and Creativity – and Will Determine the Fate of the Human Race,” BenBella Books, Inc., 2019. This book is highly recommended for all cognizant humans trying to understand the mental lenses through which we all must see the world. This book contains a lot of science, but it is not written for scientists and contains mountains of useful information for everyone and it is as accessible as it is a compelling read. Many aspects of this blog are referenced in this book which is also available on Audible.
2. Verhulst, B., Eaves, L., & Hatemi, P. K., “Erratum to Correlation not Causation: The Relationship between Personality Traits and Political Ideologies,” American Journal of Political Science 56 (1), 34-51, 2016, http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12216 . I am citing the retraction article from 2016 but by association the original work from 2002 is also referenced.
3. Power RA, Steinberg S, Bjornsdottir G, Rietveld CA, Abdellaoui A, Nivard M, et al. “Polygenic risk scores for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder predict creativity.” Nat Neurosci. (2015) 18:953–5. doi: 10.1038/nn.4040
4. Parnas J, Sandsten KE, Vestergaard CH and Nordgaard J., “Schizophrenia and Bipolar Illness in the Relatives of University Scientists: An Epidemiological Report on the Creativity-Psychopathology Relationship,” (2019) Front. Psychiatry 10:175. doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2019.00175.
5. Dictionary Version 2.3.0, Apple Inc., Copyright 2005-2024, All rights reserved.
6. This is only an anecdotal citation as I am now, 30 years after our conversations, unfortunately uncertain about the name of this particular researcher and therefore I cannot definitively cite his work. If I can correct this error in the future I will update this citation because I feel that the research he was doing on stress precursors was fascinating and important.
7. Kyaga S, Landen M, Boman M, Hultman CM, Langstrom N, Lichtenstein P, et al. “Mental illness, suicide and creativity: 40-year prospective total population study.” J Psychiatr Res. (2013) 47:83–90. doi: 10.1016/j.jpsychires.2012.09.010
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