from Frontiers of Human Neuroscience
We seem to be more politically or socially divided, meaning a lot more disagreements. Those disagreements require a lot of brain power—based on new research from Yale, published in Frontiers of Human Neuroscience. Using functional near-infrared spectroscopy to record brain activity, they showed when people agree with each other, sensory areas of their brain remained calm. But in a dispute, the researchers found many other regions of the brain were called into combat, especially the frontal lobe, home of higher order executive functions. Senior author Joy Hirsch explains that the brain is a processing network and it just takes a greater part of the brain to disagree.