Part I of Speech "Spin: Your Brain on Politics"--Judith Lewis
(Judith Lewis is available as a public speaker on this topic for community groups; contact her at judithlewis@redgrayandblueblog.com)



Today, our topic is spin—and your brain. We have a notion of what “Spin” is—and we do a bit of spinning. Bill Press in his book Spin This says: “Spin is a way of fudging the truth without trampling on it. Politicians are most often associated with spin, but they're not the only ones. Everybody spins: teachers, preachers, salespeople, CEOs, … We even spin ourselves.”

Let me give you an example of spin. The Russians being a proud culture believed their automotive technology to be superior to all others. So they challenged the United States to race their best car against Russia’s best car. The American car won the race. However, the Russian newspaper reported it this way: "In a recent motor race, the Russian car finished in second place, while the best the Americans could do with their inferior product was finish next to last.”

Spin, when recognized, may be harmless. However, spin all too often does trample on the truth—and worse yet, we believe the spin, and it distorts our opinions, our decisions, and the way we vote.

But to understand why spin in its various guises works, you first need to understand how your brain works—as opposed to how you might assume it works.

I’ll be drawing on information I have acquired from readings in the fields of Cognitive Research, Linguistics, and Psychological Research and adding my personal observations and opinions.  I would like you to take the things I say—not as truths—but as possible explanations for how you—and other people think—and why you—and they--make certain decisions, especially in public policy and voting.

I am not a scientist, so I may oversimplify some of the scientific data.  My purpose is to provide provocative ideas to help us be better at understanding human and political behavior and more effective in framing political discourse. I’ll not be going into the specifics of the underlying research, but I will cover some theories and concepts. I’ll also provide a bibliography of my sources.

We like to believe that we are rational and logical people. It’s just those other folks who don’t have it together. Who are a few cards short of a full deck. Who aren’t the sharpest pencils in the drawer. However, cognitive scientists conclude that we are not as rational as we think we are.

To begin with, our brains are prewired for physical survival and dominance. The four basic survival instincts they say are

            Fighting

            Fleeing

            Feeding

            Reproduction

These four basic emotions rule because they determine our survival. When the cave dweller saw the predator approaching, he needed to act quickly to survive. He didn’t have time to stop and analyze the situation.

When I visited Alaska, Park Rangers pointed out there were different kinds of bears. There were grizzly bears who had a hump on their back. Then there were other bears—who could be black or brown—and who were usually smaller than the grizzlies. They warned us about bear encounters. They described the different tactics we should use depending on whether it was a grizzly or a brown bear—or if it was a mama bear. I remember thinking there was no way I would stop to figure out what species of bear I was facing.  Let me see now—does he have a hump? Or is he—a she? No, I’d likely react by either running for my life or stand frozen like a deer in the headlights.

Anyone who has a weight problem can attest to how strong the feeding instinct is—and how hard to break. And, we’ve all heard the expression, sex sells. Despite all kinds of societal constraints humans keep on fighting—and reproducing.

So let’s do a quick and dirty overview of your complicated brain to understand how we’re wired.

Your Brain: Structure

Deep in your brain is a tiny section called the amygdala. According to cognitive scientists the amygdala controls our emotions and mediates our fears, anxieties and anger. Humans retain what some call the reptilian brain or reptilian complex which encompasses the amygdala and the limbic system. This part of the brain is our emotional or instinctual brain. We all have this mechanism and it is the oldest part of our evolutionary brain.

Now for the guys, I know some of you believe only women have emotions—but you need to recognize that anger—and manly posturing—are emotions.

This emotional brain has a direct connection with our senses. The sensual input is generated constantly and the instinctual brain creates a physiological response and an emotional reaction. All this happens below the conscious level. Those emotions instinctually either push us away from danger or toward reward. Only after having gone through this system do the prefrontal lobes of your conscious brain get the chance to interpret what is going on.

Your Brain: Input

So our brains are constantly bombarded with sensory information. However, only a fraction of that information ever reaches our consciousness. Our mind is not like a camera or a tape recorder imprinting everything we sense. The input to our brain and memory is heavily censored and then altered by brain processes. One of those censors is in the brainstem—known as the reticular activating system. Most of our moment-to-moment experiences pass rapidly into oblivion. We don’t see what we think we see because our input is heavily censored and altered before it reaches consciousness. That’s one explanation for why eyewitness testimony of the same event differs so much. It also suggests that the expression should be changed to “Believing is Seeing” rather than the other way round.

Some folks’ brains do less censoring than others—for example people with eidetic memories. And, it may be that autism results from a dysfunction of this censoring task.

Your Brain: Storage

Very few moments get encoded as memories. And even those memories get overwritten by new data. Our recollections are not accurate records but reconstructions of the past. Our instinctual brain, prewired for survival, registers highly emotional experiences the most strongly. Prolonged experiences also tend to stick with us. However, our recall of past events and data is selective and unreliable.

If you doubt that and have adult children, try this experiment. Have them tell you about their childhood. I’ve done it—and there’s no way that my children ever lived in the same house or experienced the same events as I did. Their recollection and my recollection are not even close.

Your Brain: Thinking

Some cognitive scientists estimate that 98 percent of thought is not conscious. They say most thought is reflexive, not reflective. That it’s beyond your conscious control. Your brain makes decisions for you that you are not consciously aware of. Those opinions you have, especially the ones you “feel” strongly about—come from the emotional brain.

Dr. Linda Elder of the Foundation for Critical Thinking says “…much of our thinking, left to itself, is biased, distorted, partial, uninformed or downright prejudiced.”

In the book “The Political Brain—Why we make up our minds without using our heads” Drew Westen says: “In politics, when reason and emotion collide, emotion invariably wins.” This is because feelings are millions of years older than the conscious thought processes we call “reason,” and they have been guiding behavior for far longer.

And to those of you listening to, or reading this, I want to remind you that this is as true of you—as it is of people in that “other political party.” 

Thomas Kida in the book “Don’t Believe Everything You Think,” says that we humans prefer stories, anecdotal information, to statistics or facts. Given the history of humankind that makes sense—long before we had written language or the internet, we told our history and preserved our tribal cultures in the form of stories and myths.

Think about some “stories” used in politics. In the last election there was “Joe the Plumber.”  Now Joe turned out to be someone other than we first thought, but it was a story with a moral about government taxation that Senator McCain latched onto. President Ronald Reagan told a story that framed how some people perceive the welfare rolls when he described a black welfare mother driving a Cadillac. Stories don’t have to be accurate to resonate with us—we instinctively grasp the underlying values and moral lessons inherent in such stories.

Kida also asserts that we are cause-seeking beings who see associations where none exist. We discount chance and coincidence.

The theory of global warming involves complex computer models tracking climate over a long period of time and reams of scientific data. Yet, we hear news pundits and our friends and neighbors saying about global warming, “what a crock, look at all that snow and ice out there. Does that look like global warming to you?”

Or, we take a complicated economic phenomenon like the recession--and we know—or think we know—exactly who the guilty party is who caused it. Of course, who gets the role of the villain depends on what political party you’re partial to.

(To be continued)