Before hearing the story, half the subjects were told the woman in bed with Lee is Arthur’s wife. The other cohort was told Arthur is paranoid and the woman is Lee’s girlfriend. That one differing detail was enough to significantly change the subjects’ brain patterns while listening to the story so that Hasson could easily tell who thought the wife was a two-timer and who thought she was faithful. If that was all it took to separate people into neurally distinct groups, just think what’s happening in the brains of people habitually listening to, say, Fox News versus CNN. If you tell both
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