Freeman, Jeremy. "Mind Games." THE NATIONAL July 3, 2008.

Lakoff, George. The Political Mind: Why You Can't Understand 21st-Century American Politics with an 18th-Century Brain. New York: Viking, 2008. Last November, a group of neuroscientists published an op-ed in The New York Times under the headline “This is your brain on politics”. To investigate the neuro-biological basis of political decision making, the authors had measured the brain activity of voters who were looking at pictures of the American presidential candidates. From those data, the neuro-pundits made some startling conclusions, such as “emotions about Hillary Clinton are mixed”, and “Mitt Romney shows potential”. This “research” was produced by a marketing firm that sells neuro-imaging data to Fortune 500 companies. This work, which was not subject to any peer review or published in a scientific journal, was rife with fallacious inferences; the data hardly justified the conclusions. As the neuroscientist Martha Farah responded, the research was more akin to reading tea leaves than to doing science. But however misguided, this turn to neuroscience is not surprising: political science, like the other social sciences, is eager to ground itself in hard scientific data. When it comes to the mysteries of political decision making, the brain might seem a better source of deep truths than opinion polls. Although he is not one of the aforementioned neuro-pundits, the famed linguist George Lakoff has now jumped on their bandwagon. Lakoff is rightly respected for his work explaining how human thought and language are structured by conceptual frames and metaphors. His earlier writing sought to overturn an Enlightenment model of language and rationality, one in which people are seen as unemotional actors who make conscious decisions based on facts and use language literally. Instead, Lakoff suggested that people reason using metaphors and emotions, often without conscious knowledge of doing so. Words are not understood literally but through their connection to particular “frames” – narratives that structure concepts. Metaphors allow us to link these frames together. For example, we might use road metaphors to argue about romantic love: “the relationship has hit a dead end; we’re going in different directions; we’ve come a long way.” Frames influence decisions, and can be subconsciously activated by the strategic use of language. In a series of recent books, Lakoff has applied these linguistic insights to highlight the role that metaphor and emotion play in political reasoning. But he now seems to be veering into his own brand of neuro-punditry. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.thenational.ae/article/20080703/REVIEW/206981881/1008/rss.