What does political polarization have to do with the brain?

How does an understanding of the medial prefrontal cortex tell us about what propaganda

posters have in common across nation and time? What does any of this have to do with the Civil

War, or hippies versus soldiers, or border ruffians versus free staters, or barbarians or hanging

chads, or Pearl Harbor, or the shadow side of oxytocin and why education can serve as an immune response

to mind viruses. Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me, David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and

author at Stanford. And in these episodes, we sailed deeply

into our three-pound universe

to understand why and how

our lives look the way they do.

Thank you. Today's episode is one of a couple I'm making on the topic of neuropolitics.

We are in a polarized era. And when I look around, I see a primate brain doing lots of things that primate brains do.

So today I'm going to talk about polarization. And in the next episode, I'm going to talk about all the good news, which is the flexibility of the brain and what hopes we might have to get ourselves

out of polarization.

I'm also going to do another episode about all the other aspects of the bigger picture

that I'm calling neuropolitics, which is the way that the circuitry of our brains leads us

to the kind of political viewpoints we have and why we often have a difficult time understanding one

another and why societies fracture along particular lines.

Okay, so when I think about America, the polarization is high, and this feeling we all have

is, of course, easily quantified. As one example, you can look at the numbers about how many times you have congressmen voting

across the aisle.

When a society is very polarized like it is now, people hold on tight to their team.

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