[permaculture] OpEdNews » Scientists Discover That Conservatives Are Brain-Dead

Lawrence F. London, Jr. lflj at intrex.net
Sun May 3 03:25:11 EDT 2009


http://www.opednews.com/articles/Scientists-Discover-That-C-by-Mick-Youther-090502-579.html
Scientists Discover That Conservatives Are Brain-Dead
by Mick Youther     Page 1 of 2 page(s)
www.opednews.com
	Okay, I exaggerate a little. Conservatives are not really brain-dead; their brains just don’t work as well as Liberal 
brains when it comes to dealing with change.

<....>

  “You turn the AM on and there’s Rush, or Savage, or another of the army of right-wing radio talk show hosts. You may 
not be listening hard, just working, driving, doing busywork or the laundry. Yet if you listen day after day, year after 
year, your brain will begin to change. ...Words, even those heard casually and listened to incidentally, activate 
frames--structures of ideas that are physically realized in the brain. The more the words are heard, the more the frames 
are activated in the brain, and stronger their synapses get--until the frames are there permanently. ...All this is 
normal. It is how words work. And the right-wing message machine has found a way to take advantage of it - activating, 
as it were, a conservative system of thought. ...One diatribe after another, the crucial facts left out or lied about, 
day after day, city after city. It has an effect.”--George Lakoff,  Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at UC 
Berkeley,  The San Francisco Chronicle, 4/19/09


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