Thursday, September 20, 2012

The Epitome of Psychotic

I'm being serious when I ask this question, and I ask a neurologist or a psychologist to answer it:

What is the part of the brain that malfunctions when you decide to deny reality?

8 comments:

Unknown said...

This country is absolutely screwed. No doubt about it. Bernanke's smoke screen has fooled the majority of the public. The best part about Romney is that he said that he wouldn't reappoint Bernanke again.

I'm ashamed that I used to blindly believe sites like Media Matters and the Democratic Underground years ago when they pointed out the "idiocy" in the Republican Party and conservatives in general. Now I see how psychotic and extremist those websites truly are and how they have their own criminal agenda to push. I no longer trust getting my news from the mainstream media.

Anonymous said...

cognitive dissonance.

Derrick Bonsell said...

I hate it when liberals say something like "Bush made a shitty mess on the economy" but refuse to defend it when you tell them they are full of shit.

They just pull out the "I don't want to discuss politics" cop-out.

Myrmecodon said...

In related news, only 15% of the Democratic party now works in the private sector for a living.

Seriously, I'm only a biologist, but from my semester of neurobio I'd say it's less a malfunction and more a re-routing of all thoughts through a deeply-entrenched Reality Distortion Matrix developed early in life by teachers picked for the purpose.

All neurons are firing properly, but they don't connect in the ways expected of those who either experienced reality or were taught from those with real experience. Simple word-association-reward loops as simple as DIVERSITY=GOOD! SHARING=GOOD! COMPETITION=ICKY! are made early and reinforced often, whereas conservatives have to ask boring abstract things like: What are we competing over? Diversity of what for what purpose? Sharing will help us how?

Libs, in short see words AS the things themselves by connecting them directly to their emotional feedback loops, whereas conservatives force themselves to recognize that words MEAN things that exist apart from the self, with their own natures that words can only describe until you acquire them in reality.

Anonymous said...

I have a lecture up on this at my work website.

http://psychiatry-training.wiki.otago.ac.nz/images/b/bc/Neuroimaging.pdf

Chris said...

See http://psychiatry-training.wiki.otago.ac.nz/images/b/bc/Neuroimaging.pdf

Dave said...

Turn the question around: By what natural law should there be any congruence between the ideas inside one's head and the world outside it?

Nature's only cure for reality-denial is death. For example, we seldom hear that HIV doesn't cause AIDS, because the HIV-infected people making that claim keep developing AIDS and dying.

Our society invests vast resources to protect deluded fools from falling into harm. Is it any wonder that stupidity flourishes when all natural restraints on it are removed?

Anonymous said...

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fvoices.yahoo.com%2Fdemocrat-james-carville-says-80-democrats-dont-5311113.html&fb_source=message


Here you go.