The lost art of thinking : Part II

Funny, I had a post on this topic a few years back and it again popped up in my head because of a few things I heard recently.

One of them was Al Gore's latest book "The Assault on Reason" which he was talking about on NPR. Deals with the effect on democracy because of the relentless one sided conversation which TV provides (you cannot talk back to a TV and question it or its opinions, nor can you, as a non-celebrity citizen just choose to appear on TV and give an alternate point of view). It causes people to disengage from active participation in democracy by being part of the conversation. Made a lot of sense to me.

The other was a spiritual talk I went to, where someone said something deeper. When you see and hear, you do not just do them with your eyes and ears. Your experience is a combination of the basic data your eyes/ears provide and your mind which processes this data to make sense from it. It distinguishes a real object from an illusory one. So what you are doing is getting input from the outside world and then using your logic to process the input before you decide whether you should believe it, react to it, etc.

When you watch TV (especially ads), you are essentially given an information overload, so that the logical part of the brain does not have time to process all the incoming data to make decisions on the believability of that data. So you get the feeling that it is true. If you had more time to think about an ad, you would be able to realize a few things:

1. It was created by the manufacturer for the sole intention of making a profit for themselves.
2. All the people looking/feeling good on the screen are all actors doing their job.
3. All the spontaniety you see on the screen is staged, there have been multiple rounds of market research and focus groups by the advertiser to figure out what will appeal to you before the ad was created.
4. There are a few keywords which cannot be used without proof (like Organic), pretty much everything else is open to interpretation.
5. Do you really need that new thing to make your life happier? Is its absence the only thing keeping you from being happy?

The list could go on, but I guess the general point is made.