conservatives are literally, physiologically hypersensitive to fear
I don't have a background in psychology either, but the prefix hyper- in medical contexts usually means something is abnormally and dangerously excessive in size, amount, etc. Yet from your quote there's no reason to conclude the on-average increased amydagla is necessarily abnormally increased. It isn't, it's just bigger, it's not automatically pathological.
Let's be honest people's brains absolutely can turn off when they appear on a quiz. It's a weird and stressful situation. Especially if you remember that all of your mistakes will be broadcast to millions of people and commented on and intensely scrutinized.
Unironically Facebook is fairly reliable for what you're describing. It nags you with a login popup regularly, but beyond that everything important is readable even without an account.
Native speaker here, never had any issues with this or any other common homophone in English.
Ok? I didn't say all natives make such mistakes, it's just that they're substantially more prone to make them, "by design". Non-natives will make various spelling mistakes too, just of different sorts, rarely those based on homophones.
“Learning by ear” is just another excuse for laziness and/or ignorance
But that's how every native language is learned, it's not "laziness". You listen to your parents and learn to speak years before you develop usable reading abilities. Writing is learned afterwards, and largely bases itself on your knowledge of the oral form of the language. This applies to any language written in an alphabet (i.e. disregarding Chinese and similar).
Pick up books, read extensively, and like anyone else not marinating in cultivated ignorance, you too can utilize the language effectively and correctly.
If this humble advice is directed at me - thanks a lot, but we've been talking about native English speakers, which I am not.
Non-native English speakers usually don't make such mistakes. Natives write "by ear" (which is how you initially learn your first language), so they can mix up homophonic words, whereas non-natives usually learned to write at the same time as they learned to speak the language, and they also had the rules and words explained 100% explicitly from the start.
the populace of both sides are brainwashed by organized religion, and authoritarians and terrorists are using that as a cudgel to achieve their own selfish aims, and are the real poison here.
The only way to take away their power is to remove the dispute over the region.
Since you're already proposing completely impossible fantasy solutions, why didn't you propose e.g. deposing of those authoritarians and religious extremists who fan the fires of conflict, assembling representatives willing to work out a tolerable solution to the conflict, and thus allowing the area (especially Palestine) to gradually develop, and naturally ease and dispose of the extremist culture that most people there are born into?
No, that sounds boring, let's just take everyone, terrorists and normal people together, and dump them into the Amazon rainforest or Tierra del fuego. Even in your fantasies you don't seem to wish for especially nice things for those people.
This "solution" makes you sound as if you're just annoyed by hearing and reading about those dumb middle-eastern barbarians and want literally any solution that would get them out of your news feed, rather than actually wanting much good to those people.
He reads ancient Roman poetry, that's where he got this quote from.