« The studies of people’s brains by fMRI show that this type of rational, slow decision making is controlled by the anterior cingulated cortex (ACC), which tends to be active in brains when they are confronted with new information. As psychologists have shown, most events in our life are first filtered through the emotional System 1, so that even if System 2 is working in a fully rational way, it is biased by what our emotional System 1 has told it. Our memories, too, work this way, so if we have a set of associations of a certain concept, such as “Sarah Palin”, the associated memories with that stimulus (e.g., “woman,” “Republican,” “pregnant unwed teenage daughter,” “death panels,” “wrong about Paul Revere”) are immediately triggered and become part of the processing of any new information about that subject.
