Forget brain scans on voters — it’s time to throw the candidates themselves into the MRI: The LA Times has a piece arguing for “Getting Inside Their Heads … Really Inside.”

The political bias of the piece might be revealed here:

One could argue that our current president’s struggles with language and emotional rigidity are symptoms of temporal lobe pathology. The temporal lobes, underneath your temples and behind your eyes, are involved with language, mood stability, reading social cues and emotional flexibility.

Though, to be fair, it also makes the case that Bill Clinton has some serious brain dysfunction.

The piece, however, points up an obvious problem with a lot of the hype around brain scanning. Aside from well-established medical diagnostic tests — we can detect Alzheimer’s very early these days — there’s very little a brain scan can tell us that observation of the candidates, in the normal course of politics, cannot. Bush can’t talk. Bush can’t admit when he’s wrong. We knew at least the first one in 2000. We knew the second one in 2004. We elected him twice (or, one and a half times) nonetheless.

There’s plenty we can tell about the candidates for 2008 already; there’s almost nothing, outside of, say, an undiagnosed brain tumor, we could tell by scanning them.

Personally, I’m in favor of euthanizing all of them and dissecting them in the interest of science. But others would just take their place.