(as seen at pajamasmedia)

The
question isn’t “What were you thinking?” but “Why weren’t you thinking
(i.e. considering the consequences of such actions)?” Assuming that
people like Eliot Spitzer are not outright psychopaths, but just
significantly flawed, what is their flaw?

How and why do people
like Eliot Spitzer, Bill Clinton, Rush Limbaugh and multiple others
engage in such stupid, career threatening (if not ending) actions? Bill
Clinton during his testimony re: Monica Lewinsky said it was because he
could. If such people feel they can “bend the rules” of the world that
everyone else has to live by, what are the forces inside their brains
and minds that might cause them to do so?

Neuroscience may have
an explanation for this. From a neurochemical point of view, power
begets an adrenaline rush and an adrenaline rush can be addicting on
two accounts. First, when adrenaline is pumping through your veins and
brains, you feel purposeful, powerful and almost invincible. That is
highly addictive.

Even more addictive however is the desire to
avoid the adrenaline crash which follows. One former champion athlete I
know shared with me: “When you go from somebody, back to anybody, it’s
the same as being nobody.” In essence, what he was describing was the
fact that the thrill of an adrenaline rush is exceeded by the torment
of an adrenaline crash, and people will do daring, desperate AND stupid
things to keep their adrenaline level at a peak.

From a
neuroanatomical point of view, men have a thinner corpus callosum than
women. The corpus callosum is a fiber network that connects the left
and right hemispheres. The thicker the connection, the more in contact
is the purely logical and purely emotional parts of our brains and
minds. The thinner the connection, the more our logic and emotion are
left to their own recognizance.

Although men will say that women
are more emotional than they are, the fact is that men start wars,
engage in road rage, domestic violence, child molestation and other
sorted and sordid behaviors much more often than women. One explanation
for that may be that a women’s left (rational) and right (emotional)
brains are more in contact and each will mitigate the effects of the
other when things get stressful. Sure, women will scream, but it is the
man who more often pulls out a gun.

Now here’s the rap on men in
power. Their left and right brains are functionally hypertrophied,
meaning both sides of their brains are frequently pumping on all
cylinders more of the time than less driven men. In fact the highly
charged emotionality of their right brains can add fuel and fierceness
to their goal oriented left brains. However, rather than both brains
offering a “checks and balance” to each other, they can cause a
synergistic and sinergistic relationship between the two and when that
happens, say goodbye to conscience and common sense.