(hat tip to Eyal Aharoni for the link)
Today's opinion piece in the LA Times by SPECT imager Daniel Amen proposes that all behavioral mishaps by past presidents and current candidates are due to their dysfunctional brains, and that we should "take a look" to ensure that the next president is one of the "brain-healthiest" people around.
What do Rudy Giuliani's messy personal life, John McCain's temper and Hillary Clinton's inability to seem authentic have in common? Maybe nothing. They may be just overblown issues in the otherwise normal lives of candidates under the political microscope.
Such symptoms, however, may mean a lot -- such as evidence of underlying brain dysfunction. Sometimes people with messy personal lives have low prefrontal cortex activity associated with poor judgment; sometimes people with temper problems have brain damage and impulse control problems; sometimes people who struggle with authenticity have trouble really seeing things from someone else's perspective.
Amen claims that three of the last four presidents had some sort of brain dysfunction. Reagan was indeed diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. But the only other president-patient he offers is Bill Clinton, relying on observed violation of social norms to diagnose frontal-lobe pathology:
President Clinton's moral lapses and problems with bad judgment and excitement-seeking behavior -- indicative of problems in the prefrontal cortex -- eventually led to his impeachment and a poisonous political divisiveness in the U.S.
While we should indeed be concerned about the overall health and cognitive capacities of our elected leaders, the claim that we should submit them all to brain-scanning procedures is absurd, particularly given the questionable prognostic accuracy of single-subject SPECT scanning for psychological disorders other than those involving gross neuropathology. Amen must be trying to ride the neuro-political wave on the tails of the recent (derided) NYT op-ed and drum up some new business for his SPECT scanning operation. The over-hype of neuro-based technologies, particularly with regards to the political process, represents irresponsible use of editorial powers.
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