Movies and books form a mental structure in your head of what is possible and what is not, Scott Adams says, but these are artificial structures based on the rules of fiction, not reality:
Our brains like to force things into familiar boxes. If you have the world’s greatest idea to feed the poor, but it reminds people of The Hunger Games, you can count on folks saying it won’t work. Our brains run to the nearest analogy and stick to it like glue. That might be a problem if the nearest analogy is based on fiction.
I would like to see a study of decision-making based on how much fiction one consumes. My hypothesis is that consumers of fiction will draw their “experience” in part from fiction and it will warp their understanding of what is practical or possible in the real world.
When I was a teen, adults started yapping about how our hippy music was warping our minds. We laughed at how stupid that was. But as an educated adult I can see that music rewires our brains, just as any other experience does. So listening to angry music should, according to everything we understand about human behavior and the brain, rewire a kid to be more like the people singing the songs. Influence of that sort only requires a combination of identification with the singer’s message, repetition, and emotion; Popular music provide that in abundance.
My hypothesis is that reading anything raises your intelligence in a variety of ways, as one might imagine. But I think exposure to fiction makes you less grounded in the real world (subconsciously) and more likely to make decisions the way the captain of the Enterprise would have done it, for example.
And I also think music is reprogramming the brains of kids in unpredictable and potentially dangerous ways. To believe otherwise is to believe that music is somehow the one thing in our environment that does not rewire us through repetition and emotion.
I think you all agree that our environment influences us in small ways all the time. Everything you see and learn rewires your brain. If you think fiction and music have only trivial impacts on us, you probably have a different frame of reference from me. As a trained hobbyist-hypnotist I have a unique impression of how easily we moist robots can be rewired. And as a cartoonist/blogger I see a huge volume of human reactions to what I produce; that’s how I noticed a fiction-thinking pattern, or so I think.
This isn’t an opinion piece. I’m just offering a hypothesis that fiction and music are reprogramming us to the point of influencing our happiness and our decisions. And we let that rewiring happen according to our cravings for entertainment, not our intelligence.
My guess is that on a scale from 1 to 10, you think this negative impact of fiction and music is closer to a 2, and not something to worry about in a free society. My vantage point on this topic is different from that of most of you, and my observation is that the problem is closer to an 8.
Personally, I stopped consuming angry, violent, or unhappy fiction long ago. My anecdotal observation is that it makes a gigantic difference in my mental state. But everyone is different.
My question of the day is whether you choose your fiction and music based on how it will rewire your mood and your mind, or do you select it based on its entertainment value. To put it another way, do you let your environment program you any way it wants, or do you try to manage that process?
To me, this seems abundantly true. I, too, avoid angry, ugly, violent art. On the other hand, 60s music was mostly love songs, even before “All you Need is Love”, and the 60s and subsequent decades were incredibly violent compared to the present. This rise of rap and violent and super-angry pop music correlates with the decline of violent crime. This puzzles me.
It’s a true and old message from many philosophies and religions:
Phillipians 4:8
…whatever things are true, whatever things are noble, whatever things are pure, whatever things are lovely, whatever things are of good report, if there is any virtue and if there is anything praiseworthy–meditate on these things. (NKJV)
“subsequent decades were incredibly violent compared to the present.”
Very true. Like a lot of Scott Adams’ observations, there’s an element of truth to it. but it’s not really always true…
I’m always surprised that people with an aversion to being exposed to an image of a bare breast will expose themselves to all manner of corrosive ideas in media with almost no conscious critical filter to protect them. The most egregious example would be all the good Americans sitting down every evening to watch stories of sexual torture and murder on Law and Order SVU or Criminal Minds but there are more subtle and possibly more harmful ideas than those.
An example in point.
Young Alrenous:
“What? Sitcoms don’t exist as a warning to others?” Why watch people horribly embarrass themselves except to learn to not do that yourself?
On the other hand, A: I’ve bantered in real life, it’s hardly impossible and B: and it’s pretty great actually. Trains quick thinking and erodes hubris.
That’s why watching TV all day long is so dangerous; it completely screws your reference points, to the point that people are not watching TV as much as they are looking at reality through it.