(no subject)

My one comment on the recent shipping debates: Our reactions are probably all impacted by our brain waves anyway.

What do I mean by this? I'll quote a NY Times article from April on brainwave patterns, as observed in MRIs of Democrats and Republicans:

One of the most striking results so far is the way subjects react to candidates after seeing a campaign commercial. At the start of the session, when they look at photographs of Mr. Bush, Mr. Kerry and Ralph Nader, subjects from both parties tend to show emotional reactions to all the candidates, indicated in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain associated with reflexive reactions.

But then, after the Bush campaign commercial is shown, the subjects respond in a partisan fashion when the photographs are shown again. They still respond emotionally to the candidate of their party, but when they see the other party's candidate, there is more activity in the rational part of the brain, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. "It seems as if they're really identifying with their own candidate, whereas when they see the opponent, they're using their rational apparatus to argue against him," Professor Iacoboni said.

The neuroscientists warned against drawing conclusions until the experiment was over. They said the results would mainly point the way for future research, and other neuroscientists echoed their caution.

"Brain imaging offers a fantastic opportunity to study how people respond to political information," said Jonathan D. Cohen, director of the Center for the Study of Brain, Mind and Behavior at Princeton. "But the results of such studies are often complex, and it is important to resist the temptation to read into them what we may wish to believe, before our conclusions have been adequately tested."

Shanto Iyengar, director of the Political Communication Lab at Stanford, said there were so many kinds of images and other stimuli in a political commercial that it was notoriously difficult for any kind of research to pinpoint effects. But Professor Iyengar said the M.R.I. technology offered a promising tool.

"Academic research in political science into the effects of campaign advertising is 90 percent bogus, relying as it does on self-reported exposure to a multitude of disparate messages and images," he said. "Any efforts to isolate viewers' actual responses to ads — be they neurological, verbal or behavioral — is a step in the right direction."

Though new to political advertising, brain imaging has been used to analyze other kinds of reactions to commercials, both by "neuromarketers" selling services to corporations and by academic researchers like Read Montague, who has studied brain responses to soft-drink advertising. He said research like Professor Iacoboni's could help expose manipulative techniques during political campaigns.

"This research can show how a candidate is unfairly targeting the weaknesses and foibles of voters, and that can be empowering," said Professor Montague, director of the Human Neuroimaging Laboratory at the Baylor College of Medicine.

Of course, political consultants could also use this technology to create more manipulative commercials, though Mr. Freedman and Mr. Knapp say they do not hope for partisan advantage from their research.

"We just want to start exploring this new frontier," Mr. Knapp said. "We know we can't rely just on what people say in polls and focus groups. They tell us over and over that they hate negative advertising, but we know they respond to it. It would be nice to figure out what's actually going on inside their heads."

Then again, my definition of Canon has been impacted by my multiple reads of the summary of the panel by hp_lexicon, elfundeb, psychic_serpent and pegkerr, as I was beta reading it for the Nimbus - 2003 CD-Rom, which you can now order (but if you want the book version, you should wait a week or two, then order it from Amazon).
ETA: If you attended Nimbus (or even just registered) you get one of the CD-ROMs for free - we sent emails out about this last week, but I know some of you have changed email addresses, so you may not've seen it. ( If that's the case, click here... )