A Fragment From
the
Book “The Assault
on Reason”
Al Gore
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The following
paragraphs are reproduced
from the book “The Assault on Reason”, by Al Gore,
The Penguin Press,
New York, 2007, 308 pp., see pp.
33-35. They were
also published at the February 2015
edition of “The
Aquarian Theosophist”, pp. 5-7.
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The principal way
we now tell stories in our culture is over television. As I noted, forty years
have passed since the majority of Americans adopted television as their primary
source of information. As we’ve seen, its dominance has become so extensive
that the average American spends two-thirds of his or her “discretionary time”
(time other than working, sleeping, and commuting) watching television. And
virtually all significant political communication now takes place within the
confines of flickering thirty-second television advertisements.
Research shows that television can produce “vicarious
traumatization” for millions. Survey findings after the attacks of September 11
showed that people who has frequently watched television exhibited more
symptoms of traumatization than less frequent TV viewers. One analyst of this study
said of respondents describing their reaction to 9/11, “Those who watched the
most television reported the most stress.”
The physical effects of watching trauma on television
- the rise in blood pressure and heart rate - are the same as if an individual
has actually experienced the traumatic event directly. Moreover, it has been
documented that television can create false memories that are just as powerful
as normal memories. When recalled, television-created memories have the same
control over the emotional system as do real memories.
And the consequences are predictable. People who watch
television news routinely have the impression that the cities where they live
are far more dangerous than they really are. Researchers have also found that
even when statistics measuring specific crimes actually show steady decreases,
the measured fear of those same crimes goes up as television portrayal of those
crimes goes up. And the portrayal of crime often increases because consultants
for television station owners have advised their clients that viewership
increases when violent crime leads newscasts. This phenomenon has reshaped
local television news.
Many of the national morning programs now lead with
crime and murders, and we’ll watch them for hours because they are so
compelling. The visual imagery on television can activate parts of the brain
involved in emotions in a way that reading about the same event cannot.
Television’s ability to evoke the fear response is
especially significant because Americans spend so much of their lives watching
TV. An important explanation for why we spend so much time motionless in front
of the screen is that television constantly triggers the “orienting response”
in our brains.
As I noted in the Introduction [of the book ‘The Assault on Reason’], the purpose of the orienting
response is to immediately establish in the present moment whether or not fear
is appropriate by determining whether or not the sudden movement that has
attracted attention is evidence of a legitimate threat. (The orienting response
also serves to immediately focus attention on potential prey or on individuals
of the opposite sex.) When there is a sudden movement in our field of vision,
somewhere deep below the conscious brain a message is sent: LOOK! So we do.
When our ancestors saw the leaves move, their emotional response was different
from and more subtle than fear. The response might be described as “Red Alert!
Pay attention!”
Now, television commercials and many action sequences
on television routinely activate that orienting reflex once per second. And
since we in this country, on average, watch television more than four and a
half hours per day, those circuits of the brain are constantly being activated.
The constant and repetitive triggering of the
orienting response induces a quasi-hypnotic state. It partially immobilizes
viewers and creates an addiction to the constant stimulation of two areas of
the brain: the amygdala and the hippocampus (part of the brain’s memory and
contextualizing system). It’s almost as though we have a “receptor” for
television in our brains.
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The book “The Assault on Reason”, by Al Gore,
stimulates independent thinking.
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On the role of the esoteric movement in the ethical awakening of mankind during
the 21st century, see the book “The Fire and Light of Theosophical Literature”, by
Carlos Cardoso Aveline.
Published in
2013 by The Aquarian Theosophist,
the volume has 255 pages and can be obtained through Amazon Books.
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