As a brain-dead "undecided," we were naturally curious when we heard the Implicit Association Test people had set up a Presidential Candidates Test. It takes about 10 minutes, and purports to measure your neurological affinity for Clinton, Obama, Huckabee, and McCain (or little pictures of them).

As we understand it, these kinds of tests look for delays in "implicit cognition," deep-rooted neurological associations you aren't usually aware of -- it's just the way the world looks to you. For example, here's a prototypical test:

In that experiment subjects gave a response on a computer keyboard with the index finger of the right hand to words that named pleasant things and to names of flowers. With left hand they were to respond to another two categories—words that named unpleasant things and insect names. This was a very easy task. Then we made one minor change: We switched hands for the flower and insect names. Now subjects had to give the same response to pleasant words and insect names and a different response to unpleasant words and flower names. Immediately the task became hugely difficult. The slowing on a response-by-response basis was on the order of 300 milliseconds, which was a magnitude of impact nobody could have expected.

So we were undecided, we took the test. What happened? (Caveat: We started off confused about how it worked and got a lot wrong, so we may have skewed things a bit.) We implicitly liked Obama most, then McCain about as much as Clinton, then...way down there...Huckabee. Ole shouty McCain reminds us of our Republican dad, which we think gave him a boost.

We've been trying to balance out the fact that we're inclined to think Obama is a good guy, and and that we've never really warmed to Clinton. We want the best President, not a best friend, we tell ourselves sternly. Once again, our mind is at war with our heart. Seems like there must be an '80s song for just this occasion.