Re-Thinking Jeffrey Goldberg

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Then it was on to the question about my political leanings. Film of Obama, Iacoboni said, showed some mirroring, which suggests empathy, and a small amount of activity in the medial orbito-frontal cortex, which is a source of positive emotion. My brain likes Obama, apparently.

(Image credit for Obama photo: Michal Czerwonka/EPA/Corbis)

My reaction to Bush could not be measured, because I fidgeted each time he appeared on screen. “You can’t lie still when you see Bush,” Iacoboni said. I stayed still for McCain, who stimulated “big mirroring,” indicating empathy, and some amount of ventral-striatum activity, an overall positive response. Images of Hillary stimulated activity in the dorso-lateral prefrontal cortex, which is a region of the brain involved in cognitive control. “You may be trying to suppress unwanted emotions,” he said. What those emotions are, he couldn’t say. “There’s a lot of conflict in your mind about Hillary.”

Iacoboni told me he needed to do further testing, but that it was safe to say that I feel no particular loyalty to either political party.

(Image credit for McCain photo: Brian Snyder/Reuters/Corbis)

(Image credit for Clinton photo: Yana Paskova/Getty Images)

Bin Laden, I was pleased to learn, stimulated predictably negative brain activity, but the neuroscientists were flummoxed by my reaction to the sight of Ahmadinejad, who apparently stimulated, in a most dramatic way, my ventral striatum. “Reward!” Iacoboni said. “You’ll have to explain this one.”

When I couldn’t, Joshua Freedman, who is a practicing psychiatrist, offered a possible explanation: “Perhaps you believe that the Israelis or the Americans have the situation under control and so you’re anticipating the day that he’s brought down.” He asked me some questions about my view of Jewish history, and then said: “You seem to believe that the Jewish people endure, that people who try to hurt the Jewish people ultimately fail. Therefore, you derive pleasure from believing that Ahmadinejad will also eventually fail. It’s very similar to the experiment with the monkey and the grape. It’s been shown that the monkey feels maximal reward not when he eats the grape but at the moment he’s sure it’s in his possession, ready to eat. That could explain your response to Ahmadinejad.”

(Image credit for Ahmadinejad photo: Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty Images)

He paused. “Or it means that you’re a Shiite.”

Iacoboni and Freedman were more definitive on another, less consequential, question. “You’re definitely a Springsteen person,” Iacoboni said. “Your brain is silent on Dylan.” When shown a photograph of Springsteen, I displayed a “big mirroring response in the ventral premotor cortex and inferior frontal gyrus, where mirror neurons are located.” He went on, “You like the Boss a lot, you identify with him, empathize with him, and you are almost pretending internally to sing and play like him.”

(Image credit for Springsteen photo: Olaf/Kraak/EPA/Corbis)

And my reaction to David Bradley, the man who signs my paychecks? “You activated a fronto-parietal network in the right cerebral hemisphere that has been implicated in self-recognition in many experiments,” Iacoboni said.

Does this mean that I think I’m David Bradley? I asked. There are aspects of David Bradley’s lifestyle I’d like to adopt as my own, of course, but there are also aspects of Jay-Z’s lifestyle I’d like to adopt as my own, and I’m under no illusion that I’m Jay-Z.

Freedman said that my reaction to Bradley’s face was similar to what it would be if I’d been looking in a mirror: “You’re seeing approval of yourself when the image appears.” In other words, I’m a narcissist. “From a boss’s perspective, I would be worried if there had been dorso-lateral prefrontal-cortex activity, because that means you would be trying to inhibit your automatic responses.”

Which is what happened when I saw a picture of my wife. This had me concerned, but Iacoboni explained: “The dorso-lateral prefrontal-cortex activity means you’re trying to exercise cognitive control, that you’re trying to protect the privacy of your relationship with your wife. I interpret this positively because there’s also medial orbito-frontal cortex activity, which is a region associated with positive emotion.” Iacoboni could not explain one other response to my wife’s photograph: “You have weird auditory-cortex activity, almost like you’re hearing her voice, even though we just showed you her picture without sound.” When I told my wife about this, she asked me how it could be that I hear her when she’s not speaking, but don’t hear her when she is speaking. I said that this was a question well beyond the capacity of neuroscience to answer.

Iacoboni told me that there was one other troubling finding, the one concerning Edie Falco. “Your medial orbito-frontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, and ventral striatum are all activated. Wow! What will your wife say?”

Apparently my brain—or the part of it I now refer to as my prefrontal Spitzer lobe—finds the sight of Edie Falco somewhat exciting. “Both the medial orbito-frontal cortex and the ventral striatum process reward—sex is, with food, the primary reward—and the anterior cingulate cortex often activates for internal conflict.” He went on, “People watching erotic pictures—and you watching Falco—are aroused but kind of feel guilty for being aroused, or simply feel guilty by being aroused in a brain scanner, with other people looking at their brain responses.”

(Image credit for Falco photo: Stephen Shugerman/Getty Images)

Could it just mean that I think Edie Falco is a great actress?

“Yes, sure,” he said, tentatively. “You could say that.”

“The good news for your marriage,” Freedman said, “is that you had a much stronger, more positive overall response to your wife than to Edie Falco. This is just a primitive response. Edie Falco is not who you are.”

But I’d certainly pay money to see her in a movie. The commercial implications of this nascent science became quite obvious to me at a certain point in my debriefing. FKF already has a list of corporate clients, Bill Knapp told me. He would not name the companies, but he said they are all interested in measuring the “strength of their brand iconography, where it lives in the brain, what is attracting people to the brand, and what is pushing them away.” So far, 155 volunteers have been tested at UCLA as part of FKF’s work. Knapp said that although both he and Tom Freedman come from the political world, they are not selling their services to campaigns. “The political world would not find this acceptable yet. Ten years from now, it will be as widely used as focus groups and polling.”

I tend to think, after my own experience, that there’s a great future for vanity scanning as well—particularly in West L.A. Who wouldn’t want to learn how best to light up their own ventral striatum?

Of course, I’ve been left with a series of bothersome questions (not to mention a wife who will no longer watch Sopranos reruns with me). I’m not so much troubled by the question of why Ahmadinejad provoked a positive response in me—I know what I know, despite what my brain says. But what do I do with my Dylan albums? Who should I vote for? And if Edie Falco blurbs Jimmy Carter’s next book, will I have a stroke? What would my brain do if, more plausibly, I were to run into her someday at a movie screening? I posed this last question to Joshua Freedman.

“Your amygdala would light up,” as the fight-or-flight reaction was triggered. “But then your dorso-lateral prefrontal cortex would probably come in and say, ‘I don’t want her, I like what I have.’”

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