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[qqqbear]

January 24, 2012
eScienceCommons
The price of your soul: How your brain decides whether to 'sell out'
By Carol Clark

Sacred values prompt greater activation of an area of the brain associated with rules-based, right-or-wrong thought processes, the study showed.

A neuro-imaging study shows that personal values that people refuse to disavow, even when offered cash to do so, are processed differently in the brain than those values that are willingly sold.

“Our experiment found that the realm of the sacred – whether it’s a strong religious belief, a national identity or a code of ethics – is a distinct cognitive process,” says Gregory Berns, director of the Center for Neuropolicy at Emory University and lead author of the study. The results were published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.

Sacred values prompt greater activation of an area of the brain associated with rules-based, right-or-wrong thought processes, the study showed, as opposed to the regions linked to processing of costs-versus-benefits.

Berns headed a team that included economists and information scientists from Emory University, a psychologist from the New School for Social Research and anthropologists from the Institute Jean Nicod in Paris, France. The research was funded by the U.S. Office of Naval Research, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the National Science Foundation.

“We’ve come up with a method to start answering scientific questions about how people make decisions involving sacred values, and that has major implications if you want to better understand what influences human behavior across countries and cultures,” Berns says. “We are seeing how fundamental cultural values are represented in the brain.”

The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to record the brain responses of 32 U.S. adults during key phases of an experiment. In the first phase, participants were shown statements ranging from the mundane, such as “You are a tea drinker,” to hot-button issues such “You support gay marriage” and “You are Pro-Life.” Each of the 62 statements had a contradictory pair, such as “You are Pro-Choice,” and the participants had to choose one of each pair.

Click here to download the full list of questions, and the responses by the subjects.
http://rstb.royalsoc...110262supp1.pdf


At the end of the experiment, participants were given the option of auctioning their personal statements: Disavowing their previous choices for actual money. The participants could earn as much as $100 per statement by simply agreeing to sign a document stating the opposite of what they believed. They could choose to opt out of the auction for statements they valued highly.

“We used the auction as a measure of integrity for specific statements,” Berns explains. “If a person refused to take money to change a statement, then we considered that value to be personally sacred to them. But if they took money, then we considered that they had low integrity for that statement and that it wasn’t sacred.”

The brain imaging data showed a strong correlation between sacred values and activation of the neural systems associated with evaluating rights and wrongs (the left temporoparietal junction) and semantic rule retrieval (the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex), but not with systems associated with reward.

“Most public policy is based on offering people incentives and disincentives,” Berns says. “Our findings indicate that it’s unreasonable to think that a policy based on costs-and-benefits analysis will influence people’s behavior when it comes to their sacred personal values, because they are processed in an entirely different brain system than incentives.”

Research participants who reported more active affiliations with organizations, such as churches, sports teams, musical groups and environmental clubs, had stronger brain activity in the same brain regions that correlated to sacred values. “Organized groups may instill values more strongly through the use of rules and social norms,” Berns says.

The experiment also found activation in the amygdala, a brain region associated with emotional reactions, but only in cases where participants refused to take cash to state the opposite of what they believe. “Those statements represent the most repugnant items to the individual,” Berns says, “and would be expected to provoke the most arousal, which is consistent with the idea that when sacred values are violated, that induces moral outrage.”

http://www.emory.edu...paign=jan242012

Now do you understand cash and the GOP primary?

[HYPERTlGER]

You will all fight to the death to protect that which you cherish.

That which is positive from that which is negative.

The just think positive ignore negative equation.

The embrace lies and delusion reject Truth equation at the core of the drone reasoning algorithm.

A lie you tell to yourself of believe is a delusion...over time you will fall in love with and cherish it.

civilization as you all know it...is a lie you all have fallen deeply in love with...You all slave to supply power to the lie that is fighting against Truth.

You all will fight to the death to protect that which you cherish.

when you all reach your maximum potential to supply the demand for power of the delusions you all cherish...they shatter.

You can see tha tin greece...the population was powering a delusion for decades and reached the point at which they could no longer supply the demand for power the lie fighting truth required to sustain it's existance.

Prior to maximum potential the lie or delusion you all deeply love appears to be Truth...as long as you all supply the lie with teh required power to fight Truth the liee can maintian it's existance as truth.

But eventually a point is reached when the lie which is finite and fragile requires infinite and indestructible power to sustain it's existance fighting Truth.

The only source of infinite and indestructible power is Truth.

When the delusion you all all call civilization requires truth to sustain it's continued existance...that is revelation of the lie masqurading as truth...as a lie or delusion.

It then self destructs...The delusion shatters.

Which is what you see happening in Greece.