People are knee-jerk reactionary, not contemplative. TV especially promotes this cultural behavior. Most conversations anymore, at home, on the street, at school or work, are a series of comebacks, quips, repartee, each statement as conclusion, one-up, a straight line or the rejoinder.
Few people have the intellectual patience to allow thoughts to develop, both on the speaker side of a conversation and on the listener side. The speaker requires a little brain work to choose words for their expressiveness and to compose phrases that suit the speaker’s philosophies. The speaker should expect a little time to state the words and phrases. Typically anymore, the listener becomes impatient if more than one or two ideas are said without interruption. The speaker becomes anxious that interruption is imminent. Speakers rush their speech and use overly simple and final sentences due to anxiety that longer thoughts will not be expressed before interruption. And listeners interrupt compliant to their enculturation to do so.
The TV format for news and commentary illustrates the problem. TV news and sports personnel serve up to the viewing customers their weak intellectual speaking and listening skills, interruptions, and they rush to make an over-simplified conclusory statement or braying riposte. TV sitcoms especially drive the style of conversation now common. The audience becomes more like the talking heads of TV, and the talking heads become more like the audience in a social, behavioral spiral. Spirals are common in nature, such as in a nautilus or Romanesco broccoli. Maybe spiraling dialogues indicate something about human nature.
Children who watch young persons’ programming face the same dilemma. Those who create the kids’ shows were and are the audience subservient to the lessons of prior TV talking heads. Kids learn from TV a method of repartee and comebacks, not discussion nor contemplation of ideas. No surprise when the new generations of young people become the same drones – because they were imprinted with the TV mode of thinking, they mimic the TV style of talk to react to words in a knee-jerk manner.
Where does knee-jerk reactionary-ism come from besides TV? Where does it originate? Only from enculturation? Maybe this behavior is primal.
Action-reaction or stimulus-response maybe is just ordinary brain chemistry and neural wiring – not much deliberation is necessary, just let the neurons fire away. The amygdala is the part of the brain that is primal; its roots come from a time homo sapien was a lesser creature with less brain power – it rules fear and pleasure, our most basic survival instincts, and it regulates emotional memories. A great poet laureate, Maya Angelou, said it best, “… people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” For example, when young we struggle a little to memorize the multiplication tables, but the task is not hard and after a bit of rote we permanently etch these memorized facts into the appropriate part of the brain. Not much emotion here as we passionlessly remember the tables decades later. By contrast, decades after a young woman and young man break up their deep relationship, the feelings are recalled and felt with emotional power, yet the words and actions from that long-ago moment fade from memory and significance. The reaction to that event and the feelings created back then persist in long term memory, but the words hardly.
Try to plan for long term memories. Maybe it is hard to do, but maybe we should try. For example, we save money now for a future objective, but saving memories for a future objective … that’s harder to do deliberately and requires the kind of mental work that is hybrid – part memorization such as with the multiplication tables, part reliance on what the amygdala can contribute feeling-wise.
The consequences (or rewards) of memories learned from higher brain functions and rote are, for example, the recollection of the multiplication tables, and the familiarity with the streets, stores and houses of our community, and the ability to recite quotes from books, and the talent to create art and speak languages, communicate, and understand other people. By contrast, the consequences (or rewards) of being a knee-jerk reactionary are: 1) the higher brain functions do not get enough exercise because people are content with the results of amygdala-style thoughts and feelings; 2) people do not build up an inventory of long-term memories for future use; 3) as long as lower brain functions dominate and are more frequently expressed in populations, then higher brain functions do not get much airing and, when broadcast, perhaps, are even resented by the population stuck in the lower mental state resulting from the TV/amygdala spiral.
Maybe atavisms rule and there is no free will, eh!?