The Ideological Brain, Leor Zmigrod

 

The Ideological Brain:  The radical science of flexible thinking by Leor Zmigrod

Started: June 11, 2025
Completed: June 17, 2025
Recommendation: Highly Recommended
Recommended By: Nobody

Review:

What if you had an answer for every situation?  Wouldn't that make action easier?  There would be no need to think in any given situation, simply to take action based upon your prior understanding of what should be done.  What would that do to your brain?

A dogmatic thinker (in the extreme) ceases to interact with the real world to foster understanding, rather assets his/her dogmatic understanding as a way to frame the real world and pigeon-hole decision making.  Once one accepts a particular ideology, everything can be framed in terms of that ideology and the reason for action becomes clear based on the tenets of the dogma.

Zmigrod identifies ideologs by asking basic questions, performing simple tasks, and monitoring for specific brain activity.  Having identified a person with dogmatic thinking, Zmigrod starts to examine his/her perspective on the world and finds that dogmatic thinking shades into many areas, not simply the political.  Identifying that dogmatic thinking is a pervasive effect, Zmigrod attempts to understand dogmatic thinking in terms of genetics, physical structure, and culture.

Dogmatic thinkers are not predestined to think they way that they do from something physical (though there may be a disposition).  Dogmatic thinking is fostered through ritual and repetition.  Sometimes it is inculcated through mentally and physically painful initiations (although, Zmigrod makes the argument that the brain structure may allow the initiations to be passed rather than creating the thought pattern itself).  Culture can foster an environment which facilitates dogmatic thinking.

Zmigrod leaves open the possibility that ideologs can be reached and their thinking made more flexible, but she argues that the path an ideolog must follow to overcome this thinking is non-linear (she suggests a spiral of thought) and there are many ways that the ideolog can easily turn into dogmatic thinking on the way out (albeit perhaps via a different dogma).