Navy, Air Force Fund Research Into Neurological Processes Involved with Individuals Compromising Personal Values
January 30th, 2012“Contemporary American culture is the most powerful in history, and the most destructive of competitor cultures… It stresses comfort and convenience—ease—and it generates pleasure for the masses… The de facto role of the US armed forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault. To those ends, we will do a fair amount of killing.”
—Lieutenant Colonel (ret.) Ralph Peters, U.S. Army
“For to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.”
—Sun Tzu
Via: Science Daily:
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.”
Research Credit: roaches
Next up, DARPA will sponsor a competition for electronic water boarding. Just bore a dozen or so holes in enemy combatant heads, pound electrodes into the holes, hook them up to a sound mixer board and fire up the tunes to change personal beliefs. God help me if they ever zap me with rap or progressive jazz. I’d rather be water boarded the old fashioned way: in a gunny sack full of rocks.
Oh yeah baby, just check out those survey questions:
You support mandatory vaccinations.
You believe mentally handicapped people should not be allowed to have kids.
You support pre-emptive military attacks.
IT IS OK TO STERILIZE PEOPLE FOR POPULATION CONTROL.
You believe global warming is real.
You are willing to give up part of your income for environmental protection.
You support suspending constitutional rights during wartime.