If you’re interesting in health or science, you really should be reading the NYT’s Sunday Magazine. Almost every week there’s at least one piece that’s health/science related.

There’s some very interesting research coming out of UCLA on politics and the brain , and how people choose Republican or Democrat (or Independent or Socialist or Communist, for that matter).

So you’ve got this little structure in your brain, called the amygdala ; it’s highly involved in emotion, and tied in with the memory system indirectly as well. Turns out that liberal amygdalas respond differently to images of violence than do conservative ones. The NYT article goes into some possible theories of political affiliation development, but could’ve done a better job on parental associations and nature versus nurture.

So a lot of people have the same political affiliation as their parents. This could be due to nature, nurture, or individual experience:

* Nature. Genetics. Your amygdala developed similarly to your parents’.

* Nurture. As you grew and experienced that wonderful thing we call life, your parents taught you how to respond to emotional events. (Or didn’t teach you, but you modeled them, as children are known to do.) For example: I have consciously worked my ass off to not be my forever-unhip father, but I now find myself making disturbingly similar mannerisms and behaviors. I’d prefer to write this off as genetics, but I’m not sure I can.

* Individual experience. I know several gay men who I am confident would be staunchly conservative, cold Republicans if not for the fact that they’re, uh, gay. There are some freak exceptions to this rule, but there’s always a few bad apples, right?

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