The Ideological Brain leads with an account of an experiment that is worth reiterating. It’s called the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test and it shows its participants a selection of cards on a screen. All of the cards have coloured shapes on their faces. One might have, say, two blue squares. Another a single red triangle. It’s up to participants to figure out the rules of this test through trial and error. How do you match a single card at the bottom of the screen with the four differing cards above it? Is it colour, shape or number that counts?
So you, the participant, make a start. Does your card with a single red triangle match with the card with two green triangles above it—by dint of, well, triangles? You give it a go. Uh-uh. Computer says no. So what about with the card with three red circles? Ding! You got it: colours are the key to this particular test. You proceed accordingly though more rounds. Matching blue with blue, yellow with yellow, green with green. Easy.
Except there’s a twist. At some point, the rules of the test suddenly change. You match a pair of cards according to their colour, as you know how to, but this time it doesn’t work. So you have to try again. Perhaps shape is what matters now? No. Try again. Number? Ding! You’re back on track.
Or are you? As The Ideological Brain explains it, there are two main types of response in this situation, with a spectrum in between them. The first is the “cognitively flexible” response, exemplified by someone who “notices the change in the rule governing the game and responds by changing in line with the new demands of the task”. This person tends to be more creative and imaginative.
The second response is “cognitively rigid”—“You notice the fact that the old rule no longer works, and you refuse to believe it. You will try again and again to repeat the first rule… ”
And now there’s another twist, one that sits outside the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test and within the research of Leor Zmigrod, the neuroscientist and author of The Ideological Brain. She explains it to me over bottles of water in the Prospect building: “The findings in the book show that, for some people, cognitive rigidity lends itself to political rigidity, towards being ideological, towards extremity, towards dogmatism.” Then she provides yet another, especially stupefying, twist: “… and ideologies can literally shape our brains, our bodies, our nervous systems”. There is experimental evidence that, as the book puts it, “Thinking ideologically… shifts our neural processes in specific ways.” You are, in an all-too-real sense, what you think. Or what you’re forced to think.
You are, in an all-too-real sense, what you think
But what is Zmigrod talking about when she’s talking about ideology? “It’s comprised of two things,” she says. “One is this very rigid set of descriptions for how the world is, and prescriptions for how we should act and think. Someone who is ideological will be very resistant to any change to those axioms.” And the other thing? “There’s also a very rigid identity that’s coupled with that. Whenever you’re following a system of beliefs that’s very rigid about the world, there’s always going to be the people who follow it and the people who don’t.” So ideology, on this schema, is something that permeates practically everything a person believes about the world and about others. We’re not talking about someone who occasionally posts leaflets for the Lib Dems, but about communism and fascism, and even climate activism and Brexit (but we’ll get on to that).
Barely minutes into our conversation, Zmigrod has already used the word “rigid” and its derivatives dozens of times—and she admits, laughingly, when I ask, that she wishes there were a broader lexicon. The problem is that simple language can make her extraordinary findings sound commonplace: rigid brains think rigidly about politics—so what? But her findings really are extraordinary, and push into the newest frontiers of neuroscience.
Anyone who has read two of the best science books of recent years, Andy Clark’s The Experience Machine and Camilla Nord’s The Balanced Brain, will already be excited by the notion of the “predictive brain”—by which our brains are no longer regarded as basic camera obscuras, taking in information about the world through our eyes and other senses, but more as active participants in that world’s creation. Our brains, it turns out, are constantly predicting what’s coming next, based on what they—we—have experienced previously, and they fill in the world accordingly. It’s only when something surprising pops up—a “prediction error” such as, say, a flamingo in your back garden—that the brain really pays attention and does what it can to process this unexpected development. And so we learn through prediction errors (or not, in the case of various mental pathologies).
The Ideological Brain fits in with the predictive brain in various ways, not least because ideologies are a kind of salve for anyone trying to figure out the world. They tell us not just what to think, but also what to expect of other people, cultures and systems. They seem to help with our predictions.
And ideologies seem to satisfy another characteristic of the brain that has been confirmed by modern neuroscience. As Zmigrod writes in her book, “the brain is fundamentally communicative… It yearns for reciprocity, for the undulating back-and-forth of acknowledgement and connection.” Or, to put it more crudely, the brain wants buddies. And that, in a way, is what ideologies deliver. Here is a readymade set of beliefs, rituals and perhaps even codes of dress by which you can connect with other people. Here is an us. And here is a them.
In which case, I feel compelled to ask Zmigrod whether ideologies might not be such a bad thing, at least when considered neuroscientifically. If they scratch the brain’s predictive and communicative itches, what’s the problem? “Hm, that seems to be true from a population level. Ideology gives so many people meaning. It organises them into little groups and makes them all really happy,” she starts. But: “In many ways, my book is about countering this purely macro view. It says: let’s look at the consequences for individuals. I think the evidence suggests that ideologies injure our brains and bodies in various ways. If you care about freedom of existence, then they really keep you from that.”
In fact, ideology is not entirely unanalogous to addiction. Excessive drinking or drug use may feel like a comfort—it might calm the disquieted mind—but it’s not good for you in any meaningful sense. The brain and the body are still being harmed.
Thankfully, the mass of people are not ideological in this way, just as most are not addicts. When people’s neuropsychological flexibility is mapped onto the political spectrum, as The Ideological Brain describes, the result is an inverted U shape: the extremes of left and right are the least flexible (that is, the most rigid), but there is an expansive middle territory—where people are “least attached to pre-packaged political parties”—in which flexibility peaks. “What’s interesting,” adds Zmigrod, “is that the centre of that parabola is not exactly in the middle. It is slightly more to the left—so that the most flexible people are broadly in the centre but a little more to the left.”
But ideology exists outside of left and right, which is why Zmigrod was so interested in Brexit from an experimental standpoint. “It’s about closedness and openness, rather than right and left; there were people on the hard left who supported Brexit. We did find that people who had the most openness to looser borders, to multiculturalism and to a broad national identity, rather than a narrow one, were all more flexible when it came to the neuropsychological tasks.”
At which point, centre-left Remainers might be feeling pretty smug—they’re the cool, creative, flexible ones! (Don’t tell them that people with damage to their prefrontal cortexes can also be more conservative, or they’ll be insufferable about it.) But that is not the point of The Ideological Brain, in part because nothing is entirely preordained. External factors can, quite literally, change anyone’s mind. “In environments of stress or adversity, we all rigidify,” says Zmigrod. “We’re all conserving resources. We’re all less explorative and open. So for people who are in chronic states of stress, the way in which their personality gets translated into their ideology might be different.” Which may go some way to explaining why certain political ideologies and figures are prospering at the moment.
All of this is heavy stuff, but it is a joy to read of it in The Ideological Brain. This book is not, it is fair to say, like most popular science titles. It leaps elegantly between different styles and genres. It is witty. One chapter, the most scientifically demanding of them all, even takes the form of a conversation between a sort of teacher (Zmigrod herself?) and a bored, impatient listener. “It became clear as I was writing,” says its author, “that I wanted to oppose the clichéd ways of writing popular studies. The book champions the idea that it’s good to be flexible in how we think about the world. It champions being creative. So I hope it feels like that when you’re reading it.”
In that spirit, let us leap into a different genre ourselves: history. In The Ideological Brain, Zmigrod pays her dues to the thinkers who have come before her—including some who ought to be household names but are barely even campus names. One of these is Else Frenkel-Brunswik, a refugee from Nazi Austria who interviewed more than 1,500 Californian children to ascertain how, when and in what conditions “xenophobic and authoritarian thinking” can emerge. Some of the responses, reprinted in Zmigrod’s text, are chilling. “Clean up the streets! See that everything is in order!” barked one 11-year-old to the question of how they would change their country.
“The book isn’t a biography of Frenkel-Brunswik,” says Zmigrod, “but it could have been. Her papers are incredible—so clear, and they feel so contemporary. They became a kind of starting point for me to consider how to conduct these experiments that really look at people’s cognition and their perception.” Yet Frenkel-Brunswik’s line of research was cut short; she killed herself in 1958, just as her work was beginning to gain wider recognition. Zmigrod contends that her history has since been “erased”.
‘Is the psychology affecting our politics, or is the politics affecting our psychology?’
Does Zmigrod feel as though she is continuing Frenkel-Brunswik’s investigations? “I hope that it is a kind of continuation, yes. And also that if she were a neuroscientist in the 2020s, she would be using similar methods.” As it happens, the next priority for Zmigrod is to “unravel” the “chicken and egg” problem she describes in her book—“Is the psychology affecting our politics, or is the politics affecting our psychology?”—and that will require some Frenkel-Brunswik-style studies that track people and their beliefs over time.
Otherwise, she is keen to explore the practical ramifications of her work. For example, “How we understand what makes someone at risk of radicalisation. We tend to look at their background, their socioeconomic situation, their age—when, actually, that’s only a very small part of the story. We need to look at their psychological traits, their cognitive traits, all these other factors that predict a lot better than demographic factors ever could.”
Zmigrod’s broader goal, however, is stated in the rousing epilogue to her book (which is, incidentally, another conversation—between herself, Charles Darwin, Hannah Arendt and others). “I believe that defying rigidities,” she writes, “requires us to envision what an anti-ideological brain might look like. An existence that actively and creatively rejects the temptation of dogma.” The whole experience is, in the fullest possible sense, mind-expanding.
