Nick Clegg and David Cameron, courtesy of The Prime Minister’s Office, Flickr. Some rights reserved
If you listen to Radio 4's Today Programme on any given day, you'll inevitably hear a spectrum of politic views from socialist through liberal to conservative. You may find yourself agreeing with the interviewee or irked by their politics depending on your own political persuasion. Liberals and conservatives may find themselves disagreeing on issues as wide-ranging as the future of the NHS, the UK's involvement in Afghanistan and whether students should pay tuition fees at university, but could these differences be a result of different brain structures? New research commissioned by the Today Programme and led by Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow Professor Geraint Rees suggests that this may be so. Using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners, Professor Rees and his colleague Dr Ryota Kanai at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, UCL (University College London) analysed the brain structures of ninety young adults who had reported their political attitudes on a scale from 'very conservative' to 'very liberal'. They found a strong correlation between an individual's view and the structure of the brain, particularly two regions. People with liberal views tended to have increased grey matter in the anterior cingulated cortex, a region of the brain linked to decision-making, in particular when conflicting information is being presented. Previous research showed that electrical potentials recorded from this region during a task that involves responding to conflicting information were bigger in people who were more liberal or left wing than people who were more conservative.
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