Do the idiotic bumperstickers of the sort discussed in a couple of recent posts shed light on a particular need in the human mind? Or only in some human minds?

This recent article on political neuro marketing -- "Looking for a 'politics center' in the human mind" -- made me wonder....

Political campaigns have now jumped on the bandwagon. Highly paid political consultants are teaming up with brain imagers - who wish they were more highly paid - to monitor changes in blood flow in the brains of people as they watch political advertisements. They are finding that brain activity differs between Democrats and Republicans who watch the same political advertisement. And they are impressed that brain areas known to be involved in mediating emotions such as fear are activated during the advertisements.

None of this is surprising. Politicians have always played to voters' fears - and openly so. Democrats and Republicans do have different reactions to each others' candidates, and as a result they vote for different candidates on Election Day.

I refer to the type of person (a type which scares me, by the way) who wants everything simplified. Prepackaged, preprocessed thought, in easy-to-manage sound bites or visual images. Is there a specific, identifiable, kind of person who wants everything made easy, who wants the thoughts of others conveniently placed into his brain, and who would even advertize these thoughts? If so, I would think a primary goal of neuromarketing would be to locate such people, get to them first with your idiotic message, and then wale away with symbols of reinforcement lest the other side overpower him with more powerful images and messages.

I worry that the primary goal of "neuromarketing" might be aimed at the more gullible, and that the people who dismiss it as nonsense are not the target audience. Whether this is consistent with a Republican form of government (or even with democracy) is debatable, but as the stress of information overload accumulates, it strikes me as inevitable.

While the New York Times had a longer article about this subject a few months ago, the Inquirer's tone is dismissive:

Freud's discovery of the unconscious was a watershed event in the history of science. But so far, the unconscious has proved impervious to detailed anatomical, chemical, and physiologic studies designed to unlock its secrets. Imaging blood flow in the brain will likely suffer the same fate. What sets us far apart from other species is our faculty of language, and advertisers and political consultants should focus their efforts on finding cleverer and more reliable ways of asking their subjects simply to say what they think.

...[N]euromarketing and neuropolitics, slick and sexy as they are, are little more than distractions - and cynical ones at that.

It would be nice to figure out what's actually going on inside their heads.

From what I've seen (and as the bumperstickers suggest), there's a group of people who are susceptible to wanting to think particularly cool thoughts that they think might impress other people in the same way they might want to wear clothes that make them appear trendy and stylish (or, for that matter, reactively contrived to appear just the opposite). Might there be a group of people who want to think cool thoughts but don't have the energy to generate them in the same way that there are people who don't have a clue about fashion in clothing?

Political bumperstickers tend to be the simplified versions of thoughts (or what pass for thoughts) of other people, prominently displayed.

The bumpersticker people might be onto something.

Idiotic as they are, slogans work.

The Russian Revolution was fueled by them, and every totalitarian mass movement has used them.

They work precisely because of simplicity, but what about the people with this need for simplicity? Are the neuromarketers going to target them and bypass everyone else?

Of course, there's this skeptical view:

A more skeptic view of neuromarketing is that cognitive scientists, many of whom watched from the sidelines as their molecular colleagues got rich, are now jumping on the commercial bandwagon. According to this view, neuromarketing is little more than a new fad, exploited by scientists and marketing consultants to blind corporate clients with science

Or maybe political science is being taken over by junk science....

Maybe someone can suggest a bumpersticker.

We need one, because Neurosociety is complicated!

UPDATE: I was so preoccupied with science that I almost forgot about a technicality called "the truth" -- but I was reminded of its existence by Megan McArdle's post about Michael Moore:

What Moore does is not journalism--but it is taken as journalism by a significant portion of the audience. He wants it to be taken as journalism. And apparently, so do a lot of people who think they can't win the election without dressing up their campaign ads as documentaries.

I have no stirring closer to wrap this up with, except that I'm disappointed. I mean, are we trying to figure out what the truth is here, in this great social experiment we're all running, or are we just trying to delude people into going along with us? Because while I've certainly, in my time, said stuff that wasn't true, I've never knowingly done so. Everything I write, I pretty much believe -- not in some "larger truth" sense, where I feed you a bunch of completely false statistics in order to convince you to support something I favour, but in the smaller, terribly bourgeois sense that if I tell you that marginal income tax cuts don't measurably increase work hours, it's because I believe that marginal ncome tax cuts don't measurably increase work hours. I may be wrong, and certainly my beliefs about things like taxation are influenced by my beliefs about larger issues of personal liberty and so forth. But I do at least try to tell y'all what I think is true, without leaving anything important out. I would like to think that most people out there feel the same way.

Of course, I know that people do stretch the facts and so forth when they're advocating passionately. But endorsing lying as a policy strikes me as really, well, wrong. I'm sure that's terribly naive and outre. But there you are--when the revolution comes, I'll be the first one with my back against the wall. (Via Glenn Reynolds.)

And lying is, of course, all relative. As another profound bumpersticker goes,

At least when Clinton lied, nobody died!

More on neuroscience and lying here, but how will neuroscience "detect" lies believed to be the truth, or the lied-to who believe and repeat them?

UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds links to a related, more appalling article, "NeuroCops to Patrol Your Brain?"

In addition to waging a “war on drugs,” the federal government is now working to eradicate the "disease" of drug use. These metaphors, notes the CCLE report, play an important role in driving federal drug control policy because they frame the remedies available to the government.

For example, the 2003 National Drug Control Strategy casts users of illegal drugs as “vectors of contagion” who are “in denial” about their “disease” and who need treatment before “transmitting the disease to others.” Such language, says the CCLE report, lends itself to coercive treatment wherein the government feels justified in “medicating” drug users through policies of ‘compassionate coercion.’ “Coercion, whether ‘compassionate’ or otherwise, is still coercion,” cautions the CCLE report.

Forgive my cynicism, but calling undesirable behavior a "disease" and treating it with mind-altering drugs is nothing new. Millions of schoolchildren are given Ritalin or amphetamines to make them behave. It should not surprise anyone to see the mind control forces engage in government drugging to stop individual drugging. There's no logic to it at all, except that the need some people have to control others is often passed off as logic (although the above metaphors are about as logical as the ones on the bumperstickers.)

Denial isn't limited to drug addiction.

Power can be equally addictive. As history shows, it can be much more destructive.