Politics and emotion: Guilt of the tonsils

The main answer to the mystery of why people are so easily manipulated from the point of view of political communication is actually one from the biological. Under normal circumstances, humans have most of their thoughts in the brain's frontal lobes where critical thinking is in charge.

But when we are or believe to be under stress situations, and conversely, minor issues compared to our everyday value system, as is generally the policy, we do with the back of the brain areas where the boss is the limbic system. That is most important to our survival and less important to our daily lives is processed in the same place.

The more need of our critical thinking on issues we can not use adaptive. The amygdala and other parts of the brain that have been our main areas of thought for much longer than the frontal lobe is governed by emotion and the Unit for short term gain. Perhaps this explanation to complaints from activists and political leaders in questioning certain decisions of the electorate who were "taken by the immediate, not thinking about the future, or remembering the past": The short-Unit Gain term biases and eliminates the possibility of extending the framework of perspective in making determinations of political and other levels of our daily lives.

The political patronage system so common in Latin America has its biological basis in this issue: the unity gain in the short term. While it is also common to hear opposition leaders challenge governments for the use and development of social misery and impoverishment, the veiled criticism also reaches and is aimed at those who are direct beneficiaries of social plans with features called electioneering.

Understanding the world around us is not related to educational attainment. This is also a fairly seated prejudice in the community policy of our countries. The difference does not know what cross rivers or what is the European Capital of Australia. The fundamental role of education is to awaken and facilitate the use of the limbic system of assessment and critical thinking, logical barriers unique biological impulse unity gain in the short term.

It was Joseph LeDoux, a neuroscientist at the Center for Neural Science at New York University, the first to discover the importance of the performance of the amygdala in the emotional system in humans. Ledoux's research is in itself a revolution in our understanding of emotional life. Demonstrates for the first time the physical existence where emotions run. That is why neural pathways that bypass the feelings circulate the neocortex.

The circuit Ledoux discovered the cause and reason of the great power of emotions to govern over reason. And fundamentally why the feelings that follow this direct route to the amygdala are the most intense, primitive and enduring.

This kind of thinking is functional to the past, when primitive man faced with stressful situations related to food, housing, environmental threats and sexual drives. In today's world where stress is mainly caused by the frustration of not achieving objectives, has long-term impacts, even if we have sufficient flexibility to find primitive sources of stress do not differ much from today.

La Plata