Power causes brain damage (link)

[misanthrope]

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/07/power-causes-brain-damage/528711/?utm_source=nl-atlantic-daily-062117#article-comments

Excerpts:
Sukhvinder Obhi, a neuroscientist at McMaster University, in Ontario, recently described something similar. Unlike Keltner, who studies behaviors, Obhi studies brains. And when he put the heads of the powerful and the not-so-powerful under a transcranial-magnetic-stimulation machine, he found that power, in fact, impairs a specific neural process, “mirroring,” that may be a cornerstone of empathy. Which gives a neurological basis to what Keltner has termed the “power paradox”: Once we have power, we lose some of the capacities we needed to gain it in the first place.

*snip*

Was the mirroring response broken? More like anesthetized. None of the participants possessed permanent power. They were college students who had been “primed” to feel potent by recounting an experience in which they had been in charge. The anesthetic would presumably wear off when the feeling did—their brains weren’t structurally damaged after an afternoon in the lab. But if the effect had been long-lasting—say, by dint of having Wall Street analysts whispering their greatness quarter after quarter, board members offering them extra helpings of pay, and Forbes praising them for “doing well while doing good”—they may have what in medicine is known as “functional” changes to the brain.

I wondered whether the powerful might simply stop trying to put themselves in others’ shoes, without losing the ability to do so. As it happened, Obhi ran a subsequent study that may help answer that question. This time, subjects were told what mirroring was and asked to make a conscious effort to increase or decrease their response. “Our results,” he and his co-author, Katherine Naish, wrote, “showed no difference.” Effort didn’t help.

[True Dough]

1. Obvious outlier

[misanthrope]

2. Note the part of the article that discusses Churchill

and the role his wife played in trying to keep him grounded. Perhaps something similar occurred in the Obama White House as no person is immune to the siren call of power.

[True Dough]

3. It's why two-term limits make sense

Power does tend to corrupt. In Canada, where there are no term limits, there have been Prime Ministers who have made voters regret a third or fourth term.

[no_hypocrisy]

4. Well, that certainly explains my father . . . . .

The more power and money he accumulated, the more he changed from a normal guy to an authoritarian, hungry for status and more power. I wondered whether it was something neurological.