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Last updated at 13:14 GMT, Friday, 14 January 2011

Brains and politics

Rosettes for UK Liberal Democrats, Labour and Conservative parties

Scientists believe the structure of our brains can affect our political views

Alice and Rob talk about the structure of the brain and how it could be related to our political beliefs.

This week's question:

Which of these isn’t a part of the brain?

a) corpus callosum

b) tomatosensory cortex

c) pons

Listen out for the answer in the programme.

Listen

Brains and politics

End of Section

Vocabulary

political beliefs

your opinions on how governments should run the world

scanned

here, photographed by a machine which can show images of people's brains

left-wing

having political ideas which are close to socialism

liberal

tolerant of different beliefs or behaviours

right-wing

having political ideas which support conservatism and capitalism

conservative

likes to preserve traditional ideas, and resists changes or new ideas

hard-wired

here, unmovable in opinion

MRI scans

a machine which can photograph people's brains (MRI, magnetic resonance imaging)

hypothesis

explanation or theory which has not yet proved to be correct

grey matter

type of matter which forms part of the brain

neurons

cells in the human nervous system which conduct messages to and from the brain

nerve cells

cells which, together, form human nerves

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