Dissecting Donald Trump’s Mind : A Neurological and Psychological Inspection

                                                                                                                                                                 

Wouldn’t you love to know how Donald Trump’s brain processes the reality he sees?

Neuroscientists Andrew Newberg and Mark Waldman help us with their research into consciousness, logic, emotion and our brain processing mechanisms.  All  human brains are constructed the same.  The different sections perform certain services, respectively.  The frontal lobes integrate input from our senses, using logic with help from our beliefs to give objective form to what we think of as ideas.  The thalamus contributes emotion and meaning to the sense of it all.  Finally the amygdala takes over to herd the resulting stuff into emotive fountains.  We each have our own way of choosing how to influence the “firing” of the neurons. Trump is a model for an apparently  large percentage of the American population.
Through brain scans and thousands of carefully orchestrated surveys, Newberg and Waldman have marshalled evidence of the plasticity of the brain.  The human brain has evolved to handle the tasks we give it in our day, and we have an active role in influencing our own brain’s performance through meditation, task oriented concentration, skill practicing, choice of habits and associations, or just stimulants from the environment to which we expose ourselves.

The mass shooting in San Bernardino this past week sparked strong emotion nationally, and Trump is a perfect example of hot anger felt toward the terrorists.  Newberg and Waldman note that, “no matter how hard we try to control destructive emotions, our old reptilian brain continues to interfere [and I might add, for example, illogically group all Muslims together as culprits] . . . Anger interrupts the functioning of your frontal lobes.  Not only do you lose the ability to be rational, you lose the awareness that you’re acting in an irrational way. When your frontal lobes shut down [the problem only gets worse].”

There is nothing wrong with Donald Trump’s mental agility.  It is just that he has an insistent proclivity for publicly splaying his particular brand of brain tuning.  He is not a fresh player type on the human stage, he is just grandly uninhibited, and a significant percentage of the American population feels a mental kinship with him.  We should find out in the next few months whether American values and tradition will digest his input or gag on it.

Neurology is not alone in contributing to our understanding of Donald Trump.  Psychologists have a useful word--sociopath.  The dictionary defines a sociopath as one with “extreme antisocial attitudes and behavior and lack of conscience.”  Trump’s fans obviously feel a social connection with him, but his desire to obliterate (to use his word) some Muslims and ban all of them from crossing our national border line (even to return home) is not being very social.  One might reply that this idea is ultimate practicality given Islamic terrorism, but branding all Muslims as terrorists is a sign of frontal lobe malfunction and gives the fear producing amygdala full command.

As for the other element constituting a sociopath, lack of conscience is a synonym for “doesn’t care.”  Trump’s extreme, and vague, “solutions” for the terrorist problem, accompanied by a disregard for fact and legal strictures is patent disconnect, not to mention his bland indifference toward how his approach fuels radicalism and thereby compromises our national security.  The storm of protest from Republican party leaders and security experts toward Trump’s “unhinged” remarks shows where “conscience” resides. As Trump’s daily rhetorical malapropisms began to cascade, the word sociopath came to my mind.  But thinking again, I believe that is not the right word.  Psychologically, sociopathology is a mental illness.  A person suffering from this is described as knowing what he is doing is wrong and still doesn’t care.  I think Trump’s care deficiency is a euphemism for being morally clueless, unless expatriating people for their choice of religion or “contracting” the death of terrorist family members is an act of patriotism.  He is not a sociopath, he is a loose cannon with brain neurons misfiring.  

  (Or maybe I should say how I really feel about this patriot.)

Doug Good

Presidential Candidates Re-Paint the Constitution

Republican Presidential candidates, apparently unwittingly, are painting themselves into a corner.

George Pataki, former New York governor and a long-shot candidate is quoted as saying free speech rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution do not extend to speeches urging American Muslims to take up arms against other citizens. "We do not have to tolerate that kind of speech in America," he said. "It is a crime and we must stop it."

Pataki is rallying us around a confusion. Threatening the government is certainly a crime, but advocating “taking up arms” (Second Amendment) is not.  And being a religious apostate is not a crime either (First Amendment). To extend gun rights to all good Christians but not to Muslim citizens is a Constitutional contradiction. The "confusion" embedded in Pataki's statement is fall out from the common sloppy generalization that all Muslims are terrorists--similar to the once popular idiosyncrasy that "the only good Indian is a dead one."

It is scary in today's world to think of a Muslim owning a firearm, but befuddling the Constitution in the process of displaying ones resolute patriotism is an awkward stumble. Something is amiss when one guarantee in the Bill of Rights is restricted to enhance another. Terrorism must and can be stopped, but rhetoric that has the odor of bigotry is liable to create collateral damage—to the integrity of the Constitution.  It is like a police car in a high speed chase where the patrolman does not follow wisely determined department protocol.

Senator Lindsey Graham, also a Republican Presidential candidate, says we should deploy troops against ISIS and "kill every one of these [Islamic] bastards that we can find." I acknowledge that we are at “war” with terrorists, but identifying the enemy as Islamic bastards knots religion and guns together in the slur, and the Constiutution is brushed aside as being unhelpful.

Donald Trump brings it closer to home in his engaging way by “finding” this enemy all around us. He says we need to start closing down mosques, gather data about American Muslims, and “take out” (kill) terrorist family members. By fogging over the distinction between “radicalism” and Muslim religious faith, this is defiance in extreme of the First Amendment's hands off regarding the “free exercise” of personal religion.

These Presidential aspirants in effect are throwing down the gauntlet, challenging (ironically) the patriotism of anyone who holds the strictures of the Constitution as sacred.

Yesterday a video crossed my social media transom that identified the perpetrators of all the infamous terrorist attacks of the past years as Islamists, making the point that we have to be stupid if we continue to tolerate Muslims. This is a useful example of how the above quoted Republican candidates likewise lose their footing. We are implored to grab the nearest weapon and attack the threat, taking no prisoners. No matter if the Constitution is left torn and discarded in the process. It doesn't matter who the enemy is. If he looks like, sounds like, acts like a Muslim, he is a terrorist.

I expect that anyone swallowing that video—erasing all peaceful and law abiding American Muslims as non-existent or secret friends of terrorism—would cheer on any means of removing them, apparently indiscriminately, just as Pataki, Graham and Trump want to. Killing them is the surest way to do this; at least jail them or deport them (along with those darn unibody illegal Mexican gangster types). The rule of law or the logistics of transport are too muddling to be of any use.

I understand that election campaign season is a time for letting loose all restraints on reasoning in order to get attention. There will be time later to backtrack and regain ones senses when faced with responsibility in office once elected. But the news crazed average voter meanwhile is expected to make important choices.   The common voter is left on his own to judge the candidates based on the one-liners that the candidates spill out to the news media who are competing for ratings.

Guns and violent responses are admission that we are devoid of creativity and are pronouncements that we are failures at responsible safeguarding of our political heritage. Our Founding Fathers had great hopes that their descendants would show how a Democratic Republic could endure without despoiling its promising potential. The Constitution has been amended 27 times, but always on technicalities or clarifications, not on principles. If the Presidential candidates want to cast the First and Second Amendments as principled contradictions, they need to either get their principles untangled or advocate a 28^th revision. There is a procedure for this, but it is not by the fickleness of election-cum-impeachment.

If Donald Trump (now joined by other contenders seeking better poll counts) is elected President and follows through on his rhetoric about how to deal with our problems, he will instantly become a candidate for impeachment, unless the Constitution no longer means what our Founders intended us to follow.

        Doug Good