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MAGAZINE DESK  | August 22, 2004, Sunday

THE WAY WE LIVE NOW: 8-22-04: IDEA LAB; The Political Brain

By STEVEN JOHNSON (NYT)

A team of U.C.L.A. researchers analyzed 
the neural activity of Republicans and Democrats as they viewed a series of images from campaign ads. 

And the early data suggested that the most salient predictor of a ''Democrat brain'' was amygdala activity responding to certain images of violence: 
either the Bush ads that featured shots of a smoldering ground zero or 
   the famous ''Daisy'' ad from Lyndon B. Johnson's 1964 campaign that ends with a mushroom cloud. 
Such brain activity indicates a kind of gut response, operating below the level of conscious control.