The 2015 TMS study by Izuma and Holbrook offers a rare moment where the “soft” terrain of [[Psychology]] meets the “hard” circuitry of [[Neuroscience]]. It shows how belief, identity, and [[Ideology]] — things often handled rhetorically or morally — are also sustained by physical, regulatory systems in the brain. When the **posterior medial frontal cortex (pMFC)** was inhibited using **transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)**, participants temporarily showed **reduced [[Belief]] in God and [[Nationalism]]**, and **lower prejudice toward outsiders**. This cortical region is known for managing **[[Cognitive Dissonance]]**, **conflict monitoring**, and the sense of **existential threat**. In systems terms, it is part of a **feedback loop** that keeps one’s worldview stable. When its influence was muted, the brain’s usual drive to defend identity-based beliefs weakened, producing a fleeting openness to [[contradiction]]. Conceptually, this experiment demonstrates something [[Niklas Luhmann]] might have found resonant: **the psyche as a self-regulating system that reduces complexity by maintaining internal coherence**. The political and religious belief systems built atop it are likewise self-regulating — they process challenges not as truths or falsities, but as communications that either reinforce or threaten their codes of meaning. Psychology, by contrast, remains interpretive and highly context-dependent. Its theories, from Jung’s archetypes to Jordan Peterson’s “logos of order and chaos,” operate within the realm of **symbolic narrative**, not hard causation. When psychology is deployed politically — to call one’s opponents “pathological” or “psychopathic” — it ceases to be descriptive and becomes an instrument of ideology itself. Neuroscience, on the other hand, begins to trace the **mechanisms** underlying such symbolic maintenance. It treats belief not as sin or salvation, but as a **prediction-stabilising process**: the brain minimising uncertainty through narrative consistency. [[Predictive processing]] reframes the mind as a Bayesian system — continuously generating expectations about self and world, adjusting only when sensory or social feedback forces revision. In this sense, the Izuma-Holbrook study visualises what predictive processing and [[Systems Theory]] both imply: that even our most sacred convictions are **homeostatic operations**, not absolutes — functions of neural and social systems striving to preserve equilibrium under the pressure of uncertainty. --- Psychology is a soft science. Jordan Peterson using it to pathologies people's actions that he sees online. Woke right.. Christian nationalists.. Calling them psychopaths. Peterson's theory of the logos dividing into either too much order (eg. Nazi's) or too much chaos (Marxist Communist).. The use of psychology in [[Politics]] is almost always political in itself. The hard mechanisms of the Systems theory nature of politics takes over the soft science of psychology. Psychology is very context dependant and hard to replicate. A harder science is neuroscience.. systems of neuroscience. 2015 tests were done to detect a mechanism within the human brain, that they could turn on and off, using magnets to do this. By doing so they were able to turn racist bigots into hardline atheists. The PMFC, the prefrontal medial frontal cortex. `Concepts:` `Knowledge Base:`