April 28, 2014

Overcoming Invisibility

By tjmcfee

It is hard to believe that you wouldn’t stop and recognize one of your loved ones homeless on the streets the way that a recent video by the New York City Rescue Mission demonstrates. However, according to social psychology research out of Princeton, it’s actually not surprising because of how our brains process images of homeless individuals. Stereotyping and prejudice have been related back to a lack of activation in the Medial Prefrontal Cortex, usually very active when recognizing other people, particularly faces, and reward processing.¹ While images of all other groups of people activated the MPC, the brain was only activated in places associated with recognizing objects when presented with images of homeless individuals.

The scenario presented by the video combined with the proposed neurological basis behind prejudice brings up a few interesting points regarding our treatment of the homeless. If the invisibility of the homeless in the…

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About tjmcfee

Freelance writer. Activist on homeless issues. 48 years old. I write about subjects that need to be examined closely and thoughtfully. The idea for Brain Sections came from reading a book about abandoned asylums. I wanted to set a suspense story in that setting. The inclusion of crazed scientists turning homeless people into zombies is what makes the story unique. View all posts by tjmcfee

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