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