Your Brain Penalizes You For Being Different?
Now this is scary. Your brain punishes you for thinking differently!
A new study in the journal Neuron shows when people hold an opinion differing from others in a group, their brains produce an error signal. A zone of the brain popularly called the “oops area” becomes extra active, while the “reward area” slows down, making us think we are too different.
“We show that a deviation from the group opinion is regarded by the brain as a punishment,” said Vasily Klucharev, postdoctoral fellow at the F.C. Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands and lead author of the study.
Hmmm…I wonder if they could make a drug to reward the innovation part. Maybe those creative and innovator types don’t have this happen. Or maybe it’s caused by society and then the body gets trained, kinda like dogs. Too bad Foucault’s dead. Love to hear what he’d say!
