One of the key functions of the human brain is to notice patterns and use this information for making accurate predictions. This process entails the creation of narratives. The mind sees narratives everywhere. Not only are these narratives simplifications of reality, they are often gross simplifications and erroneous to the point of seeing patterns that do not actually exist.

Ideologies exist between this desire for truth and accuracy and the limits of the human mind’s ability to achieve these things. Of course, one has to have some ideas and policies for running any modestly complex system, and our economic and political systems are tremendously complex. The problems with ideology arise not so much from the ideas, but the dogmatism with which those ideas are held. Leor Zmigrod’s The Ideological Brain: The Radical Science of Flexible Thinking is an exploration of the neuroscience behind this dogmatism. Published in March 2025, The Ideological Brain is a fascinating read for anyone concerned about dogmatism.

Ideology and dogmatism are closely related. The concept of dogmatism goes back to the ancient Greek Pyrrhonist philosophers. The concept of ideology, however, is more recent. The term was coined by Antoine Destutt de Tracy, a French Enlightenment philosopher who conceived it in 1796 as the "science of ideas.” The term subsequently acquired the meaning of being a set of beliefs principally with regard to economic, political, or religious theories and policies.

The big news Zmigrod reports is that the people who are the least behaviorally adaptable on cognitive tests of mental flexibility are the same people who tend to hold the most dogmatic attitudes. They hate disagreement and are unwilling to shift their beliefs when credible counter-evidence is presented.

What does it mean to be “behaviorally adaptable”? Zmigrod describes ingenious tests for this, such as a pattern-matching game in which the hidden rules about what patterns are to be matched get changed mid-game. How quickly does the player let go of what was working and figure out the new rule? Or, another example, if someone is asked to create a list of things that can be done with, for example, a brick, how many things will that person come up with? These are observable and measurable indicators of behavioral adaptability.

Another clever experiment Zmigrod discusses involved categorizing colors. Color exists along a spectrum, but those who suffer from dogmatism are prone to chopping up the spectrum into rigid categories.

Zmigrod compares ideologies with the ancient Greek word pharmakon. It’s the word we get “pharmaceutical” from, and its meaning is close, but it also contains the meaning “poison.” Ideologies can be useful or poisonous - and at the same time.

Perhaps ideologies are sophisticated pharmakons: resolving the brain’s problems of prediction and communication, but also creating fresh complications, potentially more severe than the original condition. Emulating the rigor of the doctor—as well as the prospective patient’s intermingled hope and anxiety—we can ask how ideologies are different from other stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and our surroundings. To diagnose the effects of ideologies, we ought to confront ideological thinking in all its bittersweet glory and explore how the brain’s antidote to its dilemmas can become its tragic undoing. (pp 63-64)

She goes on to point out,

While it may be a historical accident that “logical” sits within the word “ideological,” it is a telling coincidence. Ideological thinking is true to its name: it is super-logical, hyper-logical, and that is why it is so tantalizing and so dangerous. It is not irrationality that propels a person toward ideological thinking—it is the desire for a perfect and foolproof logic. (p 65)

The problem, as Zmigrod sees it, is not only about how caught up a person gets into believing the ideology and how resistant they are to considering evidence that contradicts that ideology, it is the degree to which adherents of the ideology identify with the ideology and with which they distinguish ingroup and outgroup members. I am reminded here of the Buddha’s frequent admonitions to his followers to keep in mind "This is not me; this is not mine, I am not this." Ideology is the exact opposite. It pushes people to fuse idea and identity. As Zmigrod puts it, “In order for an individual to exhibit ideological thinking in the full sense, I believe they need to internalize both an absolutist doctrine and an inflexible social identity.” (p 74)

Zmigrod points out,

The imagery of ideologies often invokes eyes—surveillance eyes, eyes that surround, eyes that censor, condemn, and control. At times benevolent but mostly intrusive. In fiction, myth, and reality, these omniscient eyes leave no action or thought hidden. George Orwell’s Big Brother. Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon prison. (p 102)

It’s easy to see this with ancient Greek philosophy. Here’s a well-known example from Seneca:

[Quoting Epicurus] “Do everything as if Epicurus were watching you.” There is no real doubt that it is good for one to have appointed a guardian over oneself, and to have someone whom you may look up to, someone whom you may regard as a witness of your thoughts. It is, indeed, nobler by far to live as you would live under the eyes of some good man, always at your side; but nevertheless I am content if you only act, in whatever you do, as you would act if anyone at all were looking on; because solitude prompts us to all kinds of evil. And when you have progressed so far that you have also respect for yourself, you may send away your attendant; but until then, set as a guard over yourself the authority of some man, whether your choice be the great Cato or Scipio, or Laelius, – or any man in whose presence even abandoned wretches would check their bad impulses. (Seneca’s Letters, Book I- Letter XXV)

Zmigrod notes that some researchers have conflated dogmatism with conservatism. Dogmatism is, however, tied to extremism. Those who hold the most extreme ideologies, be they on the right or the left, are the ones most likely to be dogmatic. Those who are non-partisan were found to be the most cognitively flexible and the least dogmatic. It’s not so much the content of the ideology that makes one dogmatic, but the way the dogmatist deals with evidence.

And so the dogmatic mind may be one that makes premature and impulsive decisions based on evidence that was imperfectly understood. A dogmatic person’s low-level unconscious cognitive machinery is slower, but their high-level self-conscious personalities mean they make impulsive decisions. This makes sense when we think of the profile of the dogmatic thinker—someone with a mind that resists updating their beliefs in light of credible evidence, someone who denounces ambiguity in favor of absolutes, who hastily rejects debate and prefers to ignore new or alternative information. If such a mind struggles to efficiently sort through diverse sensory evidence and find ways to unify it into a decision—if such a mind is a slow evidence accumulator but also tends to be imprudent, emotionally dysregulated, and prone to sudden choices—then it makes sense that the outcome will be a general dogmatism about any new inputs. (pp 168-169)

Zmigrod concludes the text, saying,

I think we need to consider what it means to develop ways of living and thinking—privately and together—that are nonideological. Ways of existing that resist rigid doctrines and rigid identities at every turn. I believe that defying rigidities requires us to envision what an anti-ideological brain might look like. An existence that actively and creatively rejects the temptations of dogma. A mind that is ideology-free. (p 239)

Perhaps Zmigrod will follow up on this by investigating the thinking of those who follow ancient practices for ridding their minds of ideology, in particular the Pyrrhonists and Madhyamaka Buddhists. They long ago envisioned what anti-ideological brains might look like, and they created techniques for rejecting the temptations of dogma.