How To Change Your Mind

In the United States, political polarization has led to some pretty ossified views on both the left and the right. The two major parties each appeal strongly to roughly 40-45% of the voting population, and there seems to be very little—if anything—that can sway those people’s views. Donald Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts resulted in very little movement in the polls among conservative voters, many of whom say they espouse a strong commitment to “law and order.” Joe Biden bombed the first presidential debate, but even though that ultimately sank his reelection bid, his poll numbers dropped only barely with liberal voters in the days immediately following his disastrous performance.

A common refrain from political commentators is that one of the most important variables in the upcoming election is the percentage of conservatives and liberals who actually vote. But changing the minds of those voters? Perhaps that’s a variable that’s less subject to outside influence than ever.

Some of this may actually come down to how our brains work. Neuroscientists have discovered evidence that the brain activity of conservatives and liberals may be different even when doing cognitive tasks that are apolitical. The differences were so striking that a computer program was able to predict a person’s political affiliation using just this brain activity with better accuracy than a social scientist could using demographic information.

This idea of a “red brain” versus a “blue brain” seems to support the intractable nature of our current polarized political environment. Or does it? One of the most striking properties of our brains is that of “plasticity”—the ability to be molded by our experiences. What if neuroscientists discovered a way to “paint” a brain red or blue, and thereby change the political landscape?

Of course, neuroscientists don’t really have the ability to manipulate how you think. But maybe scientists—and their insights into research on neuroplasticity—can offer clues about the types of experiences that might change how our brains respond to information, and open up the possibility of shifting our political attitudes.

Early Life Experiences Matter

When do we start forming the ideological views that will stay with us through life? It differs depending on the individual, but data gathered from a number of studies suggests that during adolescence, many of us start to form fairly stable political views. Not surprisingly, parental attitudes and beliefs play a large role in whether teenagers begin to develop conservative or liberal leanings. But other forces, including geographic location and temperament of the child, also have significant effects.

Some studies using twin cohorts have suggested that it is likely there is a genetic component that influences ideological development. While there is no “conservative gene” or “liberal gene,” genetic influences on the forming of our neuronal networks—the nerve cell connections that send messages throughout the brain and body—may well create some variation in how individuals respond to the world around them. So instead of a blank slate, children may develop slight biases in how easy or hard it is to develop conservative or liberal viewpoints.

Probably the biggest reason why early life experiences and genetic variation play such a big part in the formation of our political views is that those are the two main forces that lead to the emergence of the complex neuronal pathways and networks that drive our distinct behaviors. Neuroplasticity, the mechanism by which neurons change due to one’s experiences, is at its highest level during childhood for two reasons. First, the rate of learning is at its highest—that’s evident to anyone who has observed children. But also, the complex mechanism that creates the connections, or synapses, of the brain happens a bit by trial and error, and children’s brains are best equipped to handle that process.

While we don’t know exactly how many synapses—the number of connections between neurons by which signals are sent—an adult human has, the range is probably somewhere around 100-500 trillion. But we have double that during childhood. Why? Because even though our DNA is supposed to have a “blueprint” of how to construct our bodies, only a few thousand genes are devoted to help guide our neurons to make the right connections. In other words, the instructions in the blueprints are vague—roughly one set of instructions for every 10 billion synapses or so! But that is where neuroplasticity comes in. How the brain compensates for this challenge is to overpopulate with lots of synapses during childhood, and then use the child’s experiences to shape which synapses survive and which get eliminated because they’re not necessary.

Neuroscientists call these heightened periods of neuroplasticity, when a child’s brain is constantly rewiring, “critical periods.” Via experiments, critical periods have been observed in many animals in which some aspect of their sensory experience has been impaired for a while, and then the resulting deficits in both the synapses and the ability to use that sense have been measured. For example, a 3-week-old kitten that has a patch put over one of its eyes will fail to develop the proper synaptic contacts that would allow it to have binocular vision. But if the patch is removed while the kitten is still in its critical period, the synapses will adjust, and the kitten will develop binocular vision. If the patch isn’t put on until after the kitten has passed its critical period for this sense, then there will be no major impact on either the synapses or the behavior.

Learning From the Owls

While the brain undergoes the most changes during critical periods, that doesn’t mean that adults cannot have experiences that result in significant neuroplasticity. A series of studies was conducted with owls to illustrate this principle. When owls hunt, the sound of their prey rustling in the underbrush enables them to orient their eyes toward the unsuspecting rodent. Scientists took young owls and put prismatic goggles on them, causing any image to be off by about 25 degrees. So when the owls heard their prey and looked for what was causing the sound, the owls were seeing a distorted picture.

But the young owls’ brains adapted over a couple of weeks and underwent rewiring at the synaptic level, so that the owls shifted their vision in order to accurately see what was causing the sound. But when the same experiment was done with adult owls, the brain rewiring didn’t occur, and the adult owls continued to look in the wrong place for the noise. Scientists began testing what they could do differently to get the adult owl brains to rewire, and they found three things that worked.

First, and not surprisingly given what we know about neuroplasticity, they found that prior early life experiences mattered. If an adult owl had worn the goggles when it was young, and then had the goggles removed so that it went back to the normal mapping between sound and vision, it was able to readjust to the goggles once more as an adult. Neuroscientists suspect that remnants of the pathways that allowed for the goggle-wearing behavior remained, even though they were unused for most of the owl’s life.

There’s certainly a lesson here that we can apply to the issue of political polarization: Exposing children to experiences and learning opportunities that might emphasize one ideological perspective, even when the majority of their early life experiences are focused on the other end of the ideological spectrum, might make it easier for them to switch their political views as adults. For example, imagine a child being raised in a conservative household in a conservative community. Based upon demographic data, we’d expect that as the child becomes an adult, he or she would hold conservative viewpoints. But if some of that child’s teachers taught more liberal perspectives and reinforced those lessons with assignments, even for a relatively short period of that child’s development, then as an adult, he or she would be more capable of switching ideological viewpoints throughout life.

A second manipulation that allowed the adult owls to rewire their brains in response to wearing the goggles was incremental change. Instead of starting off with goggles that caused images to be off by 25 degrees, scientists put on the owls goggles that initially changed images by only 5 degrees. The adult owls’ brains were able to adjust to that small amount over the course of a couple of weeks, and then the scientists changed the goggles to be off by 10 degrees, and so on until the animals were able to adjust to the full 25-degree change. Similarly, adults who have strong ideological convictions are often unconvinced by a logical and well-supported argument from the other side. However, if the argument is broken down into small pieces and people are given time to adjust their thinking, potentially their brains could rewire bit by bit, until viewpoints shift.

One example of this playing out is changing views on people with different sexual orientations serving in the U.S. military. When I served in the Army in the 1980s, it was against the rules for service members to be anything other than heterosexual, even those who kept their sexual orientation hidden. Based upon the attitudes that were expressed by the soldiers I served with at the time, this homophobic policy seemed to be consistent with the viewpoints of many in the military. When Bill Clinton became president in the ’90s, even though he campaigned on the idea of repealing the ban on homosexuals serving in the military, he took an incremental step first with “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” a policy that let closeted homosexuals serve but prevented them from being open about their sexual orientation.

While many gay advocacy groups protested Clinton’s decision, by the time President Barack Obama repealed the policy and let gay, lesbian and bisexual individuals openly serve in the military, attitudes had shifted—and perhaps that incremental change gave time for formation of new connections in the brains of people who previously had been opposed.

The final manipulation in the owl experiments involved the creation of situations resulting in rewarding behavior. Scientists allowed the adult owls to actually hunt one hour a day for 10 weeks while wearing the goggles. In the context of doing a behavior that the owls found rewarding, there was a substantial remapping of how neurons were connected to allow those animals to match the sound of the mice on the floor of the forest with the visual image that was distorted by the prisms of the goggles.

There are probably two parts to this manipulation that are important. The first is doing a behavior: The owls were flying around and using their senses to detect prey. When I try to teach neuroscience to my college students, I like to have them do laboratory experiments as well as exposing them to lectures and readings. Educationally, that makes sense, as many studies suggest that practical experience vastly aids learning. But it also makes sense when one considers why our brains developed the ability to be plastic. It was not to learn new information; it was to learn to change our behavior so we could adapt to an ever-changing environment. While that distinction may seem small, mechanisms of neuroplasticity may be augmented by physical activity. Secretion of neurotrophins in the brain that support neuroplasticity is increased with even moderate physical activity. If I wanted to change someone’s opinion on a political topic, I might have more success if I took the person on a brisk walk as I explained my position rather than talking to them in a lecture hall.

But the second part of the manipulation in the owl hunting experiment is that the behavior provided a motivating context for the owls. The scientists who did the experiment found that the owls that were more successful while hunting had the biggest changes in the neuronal pathways in their brains. Previous studies have suggested that activating reward pathways that use the neurotransmitter dopamine can lead to relatively dramatic changes in neuronal connections. For example, if I were a conservative gun owner trying to convince a liberal neighbor that my right to own and carry guns should not be restricted, instead of discussing the Second Amendment or home protection, I might instead take my neighbor on a trip to a shooting range. By engaging in an activity that some might consider rewarding, maybe neuroplasticity and eventual changes in brain activity might lead to new perspectives.

Possibilities for Future Research

Neuroscience research into how to change not only one’s political views but also one’s ideological perspective is incredibly challenging to design for a couple of reasons. One, it would be incredibly difficult to create a non-human model of this topic to conduct experiments. While I am sure that social mammals engage in some form of politics in their group interactions, there is no obvious way to assign conservative or liberal ideology to those animals. The other reason is that doing research on humans is challenging because most people do not want to change their political views, and certainly someone who identifies ideologically as conservative or liberal would not want to engage in a research study that would attempt to switch them to the other side. People also tend to distrust individuals who switch their viewpoints, thinking that they are either “wishy-washy” without strong convictions or are changing their opinions for some nefarious reason.

Despite these challenges, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to design studies to possibly learn more about ideological changeability. An obvious solution would be to conduct a longitudinal design in which subjects would agree to periodically come back and have their brains re-imaged and surveys conducted to see if there are any self-reported changes in ideology that correlate with specific changes in brain activity during various cognitive tasks.

While this would provide solid evidence, there are two huge problems. One, human subjects are notorious for “dropping out” of studies, especially ones that require significant time commitments. Two, since ideological views tend to be fairly stable, the number of individuals who would have measurable changes in their opinions would probably be very low, which would make it hard to find statistical differences to support a hypothesis.

One way to get around these constraints, though, is to do a cross-generational study design. One observation from surveys of political ideology is that young people are more likely to self-identify as liberal and older people as conservative. In the initial study done exploring brain activity differences between liberals and conservatives, nearly all of the participants were young adults. By comparing across ages, scientists could look to see if differences emerge in which brain areas that correlate to ideological differences are active. This could provide clues, perhaps, at least to how age-related “more conservative” views may develop.

While I look forward to a day that future research can tell us more, we’ve already learned quite a bit about how adaptable our brains can be—and for those who worry about too much closed-mindedness in modern politics, the research offers some reasons for optimism. In a time when politicians face an uphill battle in swaying the opinions of voters whose ideology doesn’t match theirs, neuroscience research provides evidence that minds are more changeable than we might think. Early life experiences have an outsized role in forming the way that our brains are wired, which coincides with the time period social scientists have identified as formative for the development of a persistent ideological viewpoint.

While our capacity for neuroplasticity, which could change how we think, decreases dramatically when we become adults, there are three circumstances that can facilitate brain changes as we age: early life exposure to other viewpoints, incremental change to how we think about an issue, and engaging in rewarding behavior that is associated with a different perspective. Perhaps there’s a lesson here for political strategists who see our political landscape in stark right vs. left terms: In a red-and-blue country, maybe there’s more room for purple than we think.