Well done Colin.

So Colin Firth, yes that one, asked for a study of Conservative brains as part of guest editing the BBC’s morning news program. What started as a joke showed a significant difference between con brains and ‘progressive thinking’ brains. Certain areas were thicker in con brains, resist obvious joke, and progressives were thicker, nay wider in others. Being a proud owner of the latter let me venture an explanation. It’s the difference between equivalence and extrapolation. If you have 10 bricks and acquire 10 more, what do you have? Equivalent thinkers say ‘20 bricks’ and extrapolation thinkers say a barbeque. Where equivalent thinkers search for connections extrapolation thinkers search for possibilities. Where an equivalent thinker would weld ten unrelated items into a rigid framework by a set of connecting equivalences the extrapolation thinker would examine the numerous permutations, approx. 3.6 million if I remember correctly, 99% of which would be silly but that still leaves three thousand odd interesting ones. The difficulty in government arises from the perception of these two brain types. Whilst one absolutely ‘knows’ the answers and always has and is not about to apologise for his mistakes which by his definition he doesn’t make or change his views in some unsavoury ‘u’ turn, the other is bouncing off the walls in floral shirt and sandals trying to explain hypotheses that nobody quite understands. Where one says ‘new’ and means, “we tried it before and it didn’t work then but it will do this time”, the other actually means ‘new’, or rather, “what we tried before didn’t work so learning from that experience we’re going to do something different this time.” So it doesn’t come as a surprise that conservatives and progressives have different thick areas. So well done Colin. You’ve managed to prove what we always knew.