Are There Liberal and Conservative Brains?

The L.A. Times posted a story on its website dated Monday, September 10, 2007, about a research study that supposedly proves that liberals and conservatives process information differently. There have been studies that show that liberals and conservatives think differently, but this study goes beyond those studies and explores the processing of information. Here is a quote from the article:

Analyzing the data, Sulloway said liberals were 4.9 times as likely as conservatives to show activity in the brain circuits that deal with conflicts, and 2.2 times as likely to score in the top half of the distribution for accuracy.

Sulloway said the results could explain why President Bush demonstrated a single-minded commitment to the Iraq war and why some people perceived Sen. John F. Kerry, the liberal Massachusetts Democrat who opposed Bush in the 2004 presidential race, as a flip-flopper for changing his mind about the conflict.

Based on the results, he said, liberals could be expected to more readily accept new social, scientific or religious ideas.

"There is ample data from the history of science showing that social and political liberals indeed do tend to support major revolutions in science," said Sulloway, who has written about the history of science and has studied behavioral differences between conservatives and liberals.

If this research study is accurate, then the question becomes whether how such brains are distributed across the United States population. That is, are there more "conservative brains" or more "liberal brains"? Are there differences in where such brains are located? Do people with "liberal" brains tend to live in areas where there is more change? It will be interesting to see how this information develops over the next few years.

UPDATE: Here is an article on the same study that gives more background on how liberals and conservatives differ in their cognitive styles.