The title of this study arrests you.
How your brain reacts to emotional information is influenced by your genes.
Hoo boy, loaded for bear. Are we talking about the intrinsic ability to sympathize with others, and are we talking about genes controlling this ability, and are we talking about these controlling genes varying across race? Mmmmm…. could be!
Your genes may influence how sensitive you are to emotional information, according to new research by a neuroscientist. The study found that carriers of a certain genetic variation perceived positive and negative images more vividly, and had heightened activity in certain brain regions.
Inverse: There are people who are more aloof toward pleasure, or distress, signals from others. Like psychopaths.
The gene in question is ADRA2b, which influences the neurotransmitter norepinephrine. Previous research by Todd found that carriers of a deletion variant of this gene showed greater attention to negative words. Her latest research is the first to use brain imaging to find out how the gene affects how vividly people perceive the world around them, and the results were startling, even to Todd.
“We thought, from our previous research, that people with the deletion variant would probably show this emotionally enhanced vividness, and they did more than we would even have predicted,” says Todd, who scanned the brains of 39 participants, 21 of whom were carriers of the genetic variation.
Researchers once again shocked by the degree of behavioral influence exerted by genes, news on the hour every hour.
Carriers of the gene variation showed significantly more activity in a region of the brain responsible for regulating emotions and evaluating both pleasure and threat.
“regulating emotions” = innate impulsiveness. I prefer the stronger definitional formulations. Helps focus the mind.
Todd points out there are also benefits to carrying the gene variant. “People who have the deletion variant are drawing on an additional network in their brains important for calculating the emotional relevance of things in the world,” she says. “In any situation where noticing what’s relevant in the environment is important, this gene variation would be a positive.”
“emotional relevance of things” = how other people feel. Empathy, and its feelings handmaiden, sympathy, have a genetic basis.
Land ho!, here comes the money shot…
The ADRA2b deletion variant appears in varying degrees across different ethnicities. Although roughly 50 per cent of the Caucasian population studied by these researchers in Canada carry the genetic variation, it has been found to be prevalent in other ethnicities. For example, one study found that just 10 per cent of Rwandans carried the ADRA2b gene variant.
Mic dropped. 50% of white Canadians have an empathy-boosting genetic variant which only 10% of black Rwandans possess.
The writers of this article must’ve been so shaken to their equalist cores by that hatefact which slipped through the cracks that they hastily flubbed the second to last line, resulting in a humorous contradiction between “prevalent” and “just 10%”.
CH has a big post coming soon which delves more deeply into the darkest of dark truths about racial differences in the empathy response. There are studies out there which the Hivemind won’t touch even obliquely, or through professional grade distortion filters. Ignorance is mind control.
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