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An Excerpt from The Ideological Brain: The Radical Science of Flexible Thinking

by Leor Zmigrod

An excerpt from The Ideological Brain by Leor Zmigrod, published by Henry Holt & Company and longlisted for the 2025 Porchlight Business Book Awards in the Personal Development & Human Behavior category.

In The Ideological Brain, Leor Zmigrod explains how the origins of our political and social beliefs are held in the makeup of our minds. Her cutting-edge research investigates the effects of believing passionately in rigid doctrine not only on our opinions and morals, but also on the fundamental structures of our brains. Merging psychology, politics, and philosophy, the book reveals how ideologies become physically ingrained in our bodies, even when politics isn't on our minds.

Guiding readers through her experiments, Zmigrod discovers that people across the ideological spectrum, whether on the Far Right or Far Left, struggle to change their thought patterns when faced with new information. She then investigates whether their brains have functioned this way since birth, or have come to embody this behavior over time in what she calls “the epigenetics of extremism.” Finally, she reflects on the social and political implications of this research, providing insight into how we can, individually and collectively, all remain open-minded ourselves.

The Ideological Brain has been longlisted in the Personal Development & Human Behavior category of Porchlight Book Company's 2025 Business Books Awards. The excerpt below is adapted from the book's Introduction.

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I sat in a darkened university laboratory—a tiny room enclosed by black walls. The dimmed lab was usually occupied by neuroscientists of sleep who laid participants down on makeshift beds and measured the electrical activity of their brains at rest, drifting off to dream. Yet I was interested in the opposite of slumber: I was there to detect the neural signature of choice, of free will. Over a long summer, I stuck electrodes on the scalps of participants and watched their brain waves dance on the monitor—fidgety lines climbing and collapsing, rendering invisible processes visible. In these experiments, I studied what brains look like when they obey commands as opposed to when they form free and spontaneous decisions. With the techniques of neuroscience, I learned that obedient actions evoked neural activity patterns that were markedly different from free choices. 

At the time, I was a psychology student at Cambridge interested in sensory perception and the neuroscience of free will. I was passionate about the potential of neuroscience to answer fundamental questions about human consciousness—what it feels like to be aware or unaware of a sensation, how unconscious impressions are formed—and so I volunteered as a research assistant for my professors’ research projects on weekends and holidays. 

I spent the summer’s bright afternoons in a little windowless experiment room, gluing sensors to skin with sticky jelly, installing and reinstalling a lattice of metallic discs and wires on participants’ heads. In the evenings I would analyze the results, zooming into one of the smallest units of neuroscience: the electrical potential that precedes every movement, voluntary or coerced. Under the glow of pixelated neural impulses, I searched for the subterranean, unconscious markers of human freedom. 

But this was 2015, and outside the sunless laboratory room new forms of fundamentalism were on the rise. When I heard news about young British girls being drawn to go to Syria to join ISIS, a question tugged at me: Why were these particular girls lured into extremism? Many commentators chalked it up to demographic factors and the dangers of the internet: the foolishness of youth, a lack of liberal education, the perils of financial or cultural precarity. But these felt like insufficient explanations. Many people endure socioeconomic and technological risks. Demography is not destiny. So why did these particular girls join an ideological war that led to their expulsion from home and the erasure of their freedoms? Why them and not others? Perhaps demographics and folk psychology could not capture the full story—maybe there was something about their brains that made these young people vulnerable. 

I was curious to see whether I could connect the cognitive and neuroscientific methods I had grown to love and apply them to the domain of politics—to questions about ideologies. Could a person’s susceptibility to extreme worldviews be rooted in the idiosyncrasies of  

their cognition and biology? Was it possible that human consciousness could be fundamentally altered by adherence to dogmatic ideologies? 

Beginning my experiments in the tumultuous months following the United Kingdom’s Brexit referendum and just before the 2016 US presidential election, I was among the first wave of scientists to use cognitive and neuroscientific methods to investigate the origins and consequences of ideological thinking. I recruited participants online who spanned all walks of life and held views that traversed the traditional to the ultraprogressive—from radical activists writing on right-wing platforms to German adolescents living in a reunified Berlin and elderly pensioners in remote British villages. I harnessed novel methods that would allow thousands of participants to complete the experiments from the comfort of their own homes, and I collaborated with international colleagues to collect brain scans and genetic samples of selected participants in university laboratories. 

It was a rare choice to adopt methods that used cognitive assessments and brain-scanning technology to investigate ideologies. Only a handful of international research teams were interested in bringing the biological and political sciences together. It was a high-risk, high-reward research strategy. And it paid off. 

With modern scientific techniques we are now able to ask how deeply into the architecture of the human brain ideological systems can penetrate—how far into the mind and body indoctrination really goes. We have discovered that the brain schooled by ideology is a brain worth exploring. A close study uncovers what ideologies can do to our bodies and how harsh moralities slip into the deepest recesses of human consciousness. It illuminates who has the potential for extremism; why some brains are particularly vulnerable while others are more flexible and resilient. 

The young British adolescents who were radicalized in their bedrooms, at sleepovers, on smartphones, were extraordinary cases of ordinary processes—processes that every brain is susceptible to, and that some brains are more receptive to than others. The clues for the differences in risk between us lie in our cells, our bodies, our personal narratives. 

Although a dogmatic environment can produce habits and compulsions that appear to the outside observer to be passive and automatic—almost without thought—when we investigate the ideological brain we see that there are sophisticated and dynamic processes happening inside. Neurons buzz, fire in synchrony, and shoot action potentials with every dutiful step. The origins of our ideological convictions emerge from within our bodies and the outcomes of our ideological beliefs can be felt and seen within our bodies too. 

This book weaves together neuroscience and politics and philosophy to challenge our understanding of what it means to exist as human beings awash in dogmas, trying to stay afloat among raging orthodoxies. It can be read with different ideologies in mind—nationalistic movements, religious ideologies, racist worldviews, conspiratorial cults, “far right” and “far left” and political ideologies that are maybe not far away enough. 

Although we will engage with the science of beliefs and the results of laboratory experiments, the critique of ideologies is not an exercise of pure reason. It has practical implications. It must reckon with people’s emotional investments, such as their love of tradition and history; of groups and collectivities; of principles and guiding moral laws and categories; of faith and dedication, and of the people we hold in memory when we hear the word “ideology.” Many kinds of love are on the line. The stakes are immeasurably high. 

This book conveys a new and radical science that urges us to reimagine our ideologies and the risks involved in adopting rigid ways of thinking. It reveals that our politics are not superficial: our politics can become cellular. We will zoom into the ideological brain with a scientist’s microscope, a philosopher’s concern, a humanist’s hope, and an active citizen’s empathy and imagination—hoping that in the contrasts of openness and hate, revision and tradition, evidence and imposed fates, we will uncover what the free, authentic, and tolerant brain looks like too. 

 

Excerpted from The Ideological Brain: The Radical Science of Flexible Thinking by Leor Zmigrod, published by Henry Holt & Company. Copyright © 2025 by Leor Zmigrod. All rights reserved.

 

About the Author

Leor Zmigrod is a prize-winning scientist whose research has pioneered the new field of “political neuroscience.” She completed her BA and PhD at Cambridge University as a Gates Scholar and won a prestigious Junior Research Fellowship at Churchill College, Cambridge to develop an independent research program into the cognitive roots of ideological convictions. Prior to coming to Cambridge in 2013 at the age of 18, she lived in Amsterdam. She was born in the United States and spent her early childhood in Israel. In addition to English, she speaks fluent Hebrew, and she also has various levels of proficiency in Dutch, Spanish, French and German.

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Named a best book of the year by The Guardian and The Telegraph Why do some people become radicalized? How do ideologies shape the human brain? And...
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