I know one of the heavily armed cowards. He’s a really big guy who shouldn’t be scared of much. I’m sure he has representative of every gun ever manufactured and several copies to boot and I say “What are you scared of to be so armed?” The only answer I can get, apart from thinking he can fight off the military coming for his guns, is some drug-crazed maniac might accost him. “And you’re scared that sitting on them will not be sufficient?” If 300 lbs of ass isn’t enough, I can’t see a few extra grams of lead changing much.
Conservatives think with their “lizard brain” journals.plos.org/plosone/artic … ne.0052970
[i]Democrats showed significantly greater activity in the left insula, while Republicans showed significantly greater activity in the right amygdala.
These results suggest that liberals and conservatives engage different cognitive processes when they think about risk, and they support recent evidence that conservatives show greater sensitivity to threatening stimuli.[/i]
The brain activity in these two regions alone could predict whether a person is a Democrat or a Republican with 82.9% accuracy.
The Amygdala is in the limbic system, which is the lizard brain, the oldest part of the brain in terms of evolution and is responsible for “fight or flight” and instinct.
The Insula is in the cerebral cortex, which is the thinking part of the brain and much higher evolved, although we don’t yet understand what specific role the insula plays.
The point is that when presented with risk, the democrat engages in deliberate thought while the republican acts like an animal… and this is 82.9% accurate.
Corroborating study here: ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3092984/
Anecdotally, I’ve noticed that both humans and animals that growup in stressful environments (sickness, poverty) tend to act more animalistic/instinctual/mechanistic as adults as opposed to being contemplative, thoughtful, and somewhat humanish.
When an organism develops in stress, it realizes the duty to either die in order to feed the genetically superior survivors with its own carcass (or at least stop competing for food) or to hurry and reproduce in hope that some genetic variation will overcome the stress. Cognition, apparently, doesn’t confer any advantage as evidenced by its manifestation only where abundance and prosperity reside, while the opposite seems to occur in stress and scarcity.
Abundance = development of cerebral cortex mass
Scarcity = development of amygdala mass
That’s my theory anyway.
What else can explain why poor people support the system that keeps them poor if poverty hasn’t damaged their brains?