Some thoughts on the neural mechanisms of voting, auditory illusions and paranoia

With elections only a few days away here in the States, I find myself wondering – as I always do every 2 years – what is behind the vote I’m casting, and the votes of others. Although most of us probably think we vote on issues alone, research on the brain suggests that many people vote with their identity instead. If you tend to relate to a certain party’s identifying characteristics, or perhaps if your family has voted with a particular party for generations, your subconscious will tend to shift your thinking in favor of that party. There is a neurological basis for this. In 2004 Drs. Freedman and Iocaboni, at UCLA, used MRI to analyze which areas of the brain “light up” when subjects are shown political content associated with a particular candidate. If the candidate was already preferred by the subject, neural areas associated with empathy became highly active, while areas of negative emotion lit up when presented with information associated with opposing candidates. The content of the message itself is less important than the context in many cases. Subconsciously, the mind finds a reason to dislike messages seen to be outside of our own identity. It is interesting to observe this happening in my own brain as I view the hundreds of campaign ads bombarding the airwaves, some of which are hard to affiliate with a particular party until well into the commercial.

As always, the political process is fascinating to me, and I’m enjoying watching it all unfold. Ohio just implemented touch screen voting, so I’m looking froward to using that for the first time, and I’m keeping my fingers crossed hoping the technology behind it is well made. The techie in me wants to see elections move into the modern age. But with the modern age comes modern paranoias. I remember when we first started the company an individual in a discussion group warned others not to use our software because the government embeds “microchips” in all white noise to control the populace. Another customer contacted us a year ago, convinced that she heard “buy this software” subliminally while playing our sessions. It turned out she wasn’t even using our software at all, having confused us with another company – but even so I would be willing to bet it was just an auditory illusion.

More than a few people hear words and other auditory illusions in some of the background sound files we have used over the years, to the point where sometimes I have to manually edit the sound file and take out the “human-sounding” portions. When a sound file is used repeatedly the mind can start to identify patterns where none exist, and I sometimes wonder if what people hear in these sound files is a kind of representation of the subconscious mind, sort of like the famous inkblot test.

Well on to what we’ve been up to here at Transparent:

Mind Stereo has been a great success. I didn’t know what to expect in releasing it – nothing like it has really been done before. While making it I often sat back and wondered to myself if I was being arrogant in assuming people would want yet another media player on their computer, even one as unique as this. But, just the other day a few customers indicated they are actually using it as their default, so I’m real proud of that.

There has been some discussion lately of moving to other platforms, like OSX, PocketPC, Linux, etc. I want everyone to know that we hear you, and I’m really hoping to look more into this next year. I just heard that our software has some troubles on Windows Vista, so I’m going to be working on making that work before Vista is officially released to the public. So much to do!

Meanwhile, we’re all hard at work here on a big new project. This one has me really excited. I’m hoping to start beta testing on it in a month or 2, but the more we develop and the more we research, the more ideas pop up! We’ll often be in the middle of a project and then add a dozen new features that, while exciting, add a lot of time to the whole process.

I’m hoping to release more details about our new developments soon, maybe even along with some pre-release screenshots.

Wishing everyone all the best. To those readers in the U.S., happy voting on tuesday!

Adam