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The Ideological Brain

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Brought to you by Penguin.

Why do some people become radicalized?
Who is most susceptible to ideological thinking?
Can we unchain our minds from toxic dogmas?

The human brain faces a set of dilemmas every day: how to achieve coherence from fragmented sensory inputs and how to attain connection with other people in an increasingly atomized and isolating world. Ideologies offer a shortcut, providing easy answers, scripts to follow, and a sense of shared identity. Whether our ideologies are far-right, far-left, nationalist, religious, or even progressive, they simplify our understanding and give us organizing frameworks through which to act and interact with others. But ideologies come at a cost: demanding conformity and suppressing individuality through rigid rules, repetitive rituals, and intolerance. Once ideologies grip our minds, they fundamentally transform us, making us less sensitive and adaptable.

Drawing on her groundbreaking research, Dr Leor Zmigrod uncovers the hidden mechanisms driving our beliefs and behaviours. She uses the powerful tools of neuroscience to show that our political beliefs are not transient thoughts in our minds, divorced from our bodies – ideologies actually change our neural architecture, our cells. For instance, she demonstrates how a simple card sorting game can reveal your entire approach to life. Cognitive rigidity in such tasks – struggling to adapt to new rules – mirrors the rigidity with which you cling to social and political ideologies. While some individuals are more susceptible to dogmatic thinking than others, all of us can strive to be more flexible.

The Ideological Brain is essential reading in today’s polarized and polarizing world. To foster a more informed, resilient and freer society, we need to zoom into the processes happening inside each of us and learn to spot rigid thinking in ourselves and others. We need to learn to avoid black-and-white thinking and embrace ambiguity. We need to recognize our ability to resist irrational rules and authority. Regardless of your political stance, this book will challenge you to reassess your convictions – and what they are doing to your brain.

‘Filled with insightful findings, this book shows that ideological extremism and polarization are not just problems to fret about but puzzles that can be studied and understood’
Steven Pinker

© Leor Zmigrod 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025

Critics Review

Filled with insightful findings, this book shows that ideological extremism and polarization are not just problems to fret about but puzzles that can be studied and understood

Steven Pinker, author of The Better Angels of Our Nature

An extraordinary, eye-opening and startlingly original book, showing what ideology does to the human brain, and casting a bright new light on the sources and nature of dogmatism, ideology and open-mindedness. Packed with insights, this is a remarkable achievement

Cass R. Sunstein, co-author of Nudge

Fascinating, insightful, lucidly and entertainingly written, Zmigrod’s account illuminates the debate about the nature of ideology and the power it exerts, by bringing cognitive neuroscience – in fact, an intriguing development of it: ‘political neuroscience’ – to bear on both. An educative, rewarding, troubling, but ultimately hopeful, book

A. C. Grayling, author of The History of Philosophy

A fascinating and important exploration of the causes of cognitive rigidity and of the factors that make some people more vulnerable to it than others. Leor Zmigrod draws on neuroscience, psychology and philosophy in her quest to understand why and how some people are drawn to authoritarian thinking and even to terrorism while others are able to question and resist dominant ideologies

Nigel Warburton, author of A Little History of Philosophy

This remarkable book tells us something fascinating and heartening about the neuroscience of our inflexibilities and our dogmatisms. Lucid and eloquent, The Ideological Brain couldn’t be more timely

Adam Phillips, author of Missing Out

The notion that political phenomena would somehow exist in a realm separate from that of human life regulation is pure fiction, as Leor Zmigrod demonstrates so clearly. Her book is a must read

Antonio Damasio, author of Feeling and Knowing

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