Stephen Colbert's much-publicized March to Keep Fear Alive tomorrow-and his whole schtick really-may be making a far greater political impact than you consciously realize. I'm no neuroscientist, but I might even argue that the faux right-wing pundit is physically altering the very structure of your brain.
Such an outlandish allegation requires a little set-up. Ready for an adventure into the political brain?
Let's start with rats.
In a brilliant Radiolab episode called Memory and Forgetting (I highly recommend listening to the first 21 minutes here), hosts Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich discuss a memory experiment with rats. They play an audio tone for a rat, just before giving it a slight electrical shock. Predictably, the next time the tone is played, the rat reacts. Here's Jad:
The moment it hears the tone and then feels the shock, inside its head a bunch of neurons start to build a connection... Memory is a structure that connects one brain cell to another. So the next time that the rat hears that damn tone, since inside its brain tone brain cells are physically connected to shock brain cells, it's gonna know that after this [tone sound plays] comes this [shock sound effect plays]. Instead of just listening passively, it's gonna freeze, bracing itself for what is about to happen.
Ok, duh, but here's a little more about how it happens physically inside the brain. Memory is "a physical thing," explains regular Radiolab contributor Jonah Leher (author of the book How We Decide), "It's not simply an idea. It's a physical trace left in your brain. [A trace made largely of] proteins. Proteins are the building blocks of memory."
Neuroscientists figured this out through experiments with the drug anisomycin, which inhibits the formation of new proteins. They found that without new proteins there can be no new memory. So when they repeated the experiment but this time gave the rats anisomycin as they played the tone (right before the shock), these rats did not react to the tone afterward. They could not learn a correlation between tone and shock, because they could not form proteins to make this experience into a memory.
