Steven Johnson wrote a nice piece in the NYTimes Magazine this past weekend on the Political Brain. While I've covered this research a few month's back in neuromarketing our next President, Steven adds one very important point to the value of this type of research:

"Whatever conclusions we end up extracting for this line of research won't come exclusively from the neuroscientists. You'd need sociologists and political scientists and philosophers -- not to mention those political strategists -- to make sense of the results, to put them in context, and to propose new avenues of research. The neuroscientists would be mostly there to explain the results in terms of brain anatomy and function, leaving it to the social scientists to interpret the results on the level of human experience. In other words, the scans don't give you answers. They give you new kinds of questions."

For more of Steven's thoughts check out his excellent book Mind Wide Open or his previous guest entries here on Brain Waves.