Are we born political?

 Dr Leor Zmigrod has made a discovery, the politics a person associated with is correlated to biological factors. She has found that the brain structures of a person differ based on the types of politics a person follows and if their thinking is "flexible" or "rigid". For example, people with conservative beliefs have a larger amygdala, when compared to people with liberal ideologies. The amygdala being the part of the brain that processes fear and disgust. 

On a genetic level, it was found that people who are more cognitively flexible, have genetic markers that indicate greater amounts of dopamine in their prefrontal cortex, and less in the striatal regions of the brain. Dopamine has been known to be a genetic factor in personality, like extraversion traits. 

This can be a scary concept, as biological determinations for politics take away from hope that people can adapt their beliefs, as well as fear of interfering with a person's genetics/brain composition in order to change beliefs. These findings also emphasize how some individuals are more susceptible to political influences like propaganda. 

Dr Zmigrod mentions that she plans to do a longitudinal study, to determine if the brain's structure influences politics, or if politics influences the makeup of the brain later in life. 

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More on Dopamine and Personality

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Fruit Flies Improve Human Lives

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       I think this study is the start to what could be a huge breakthrough in keeping humans healthier longer. More studies that reach to improve human health could help the human population be healthier as a whole and could take away the physical and mental pain that people diagnosed with aging diseases have to encounter. My only concerns by keeping humans around longer are when will it be too long of a life for us and how long will it take before the human population becomes simply unbearable?
     

Shutting Down Alzheimer's

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I find this article extremely relevant to today's society. There are so many seniors with Alzheimer's or some form of dimensia that creates barriers between themselves and their family, when they are in a lonely stage of life to begin with. Just as keeping an active lifestyle improves physical health, I believe that staying mentally active is the best way to prevent the on coming of this disease. Hopefully modern science will eventually find a safe way to prevent the disease as well.