Getting in Our Right Mind

It must be frustrating for North American national governments to continue to try to sell  the “WE’RE IN DANGER!” militarization story when the true empirical evidence points in the opposite direction.  At what point does (did?) this fear mongering become an absurdity?  At its inception?  What is the trending inevitable conclusion made evident in the following?

Stevan Pinker – 2015 Nobel Peace Price Forum

In this lecture about why humans are so interested in violence Canadian born Harvard Professor and Nobel Laureate Steven Pinker states that there are 2 crimes via which Violence News Codependency makes humans commit violence because of anticipation of how it will covered in the news media. Both are low-death/high visibility events and are pretty much creations of the news media:

1. Terrorism – “ A technology for extracting the maximum amount of publicity for the smallest amount of violence. By any count terrorism accounts for a trivial proportion of the world’s deaths by violence to say nothing of deaths from all causes put together. The most damaging event in history was 911 which killed fewer than 3000 people. That’s kind of “in the noise” when it comes to statistics on homicide or civil wars. – 14:00
2. Rampage Killings – Occurs because of the wall-to-wall news coverage. Those for whom notoriety is more important than life itself and it’s easier than curing cancer.

Professor Pinker’s data coalesces neatly with the many data sets of Hans Rosling, and other data sets, to demonstrate conclusively how very much the world is becoming an increasingly better, more peaceful, place in almost every way.  See the uplifting “THE FACTS” section of my Positive Links web page.

When the government is telling us one thing and the overwhelming evidence is demonstrating the opposite to be true how do we stay in our right mind?

Steven Pinker’s video conveys excellent positive data but the following Ted Talk was(is?), at least at one time, the most popular Ted Talk in history:

Jill Bolte Taylor’s Stroke of Insight.  This video conveys the significance of staying in our reasoning linear world in a cyclic universe.  Don’t leave home without your left hemisphere.

Unfortunately the left hemisphere is also more of a cold, selfish, entropic, misanthrope.  It deduces for you as real possibilities things that may not even exist and it’s that same little negative voice that sometimes berates you.  The left brain is also incapable of seeing the simplest “Big Picture”.

The right hemisphere exclusively has capacity of vision to see the “Big Picture” as well as the capacity for, among other emotions, “Love”   Both are supremely significant factors.

I’ve previously mentioned the great on-going universal battle of Life Vs Entropy.  “We” Vs “I”.

The right hemisphere is “Life”and “We” and “Love” and “Big Picture” and “Music” and “Creativity” and “Nature”.

When the Corpus Collosum, which connects the brain’s hemispheres, is severed the subject develops a syndrome whereby, for example, the subject’s left hand actually struggles with the right hand in order for it to complete a simple “Big Picture” puzzle.  [See time code 29.50 – 32.19 of this video.  More examples at time code 38.25 – 39.25 of this video.

Brain Hemisphere Primer – Alan Alda interviews Michael Gazzaniga

More Recent History

Increased stimulation of the left hemisphere has historically been taking place from the time, and as a result, of the invention of the alphabet, mathematics, and the printing press.  While the two hemispheres generally work in tandem the left hemisphere has incurred, for many hundreds of recent years, the vast preponderance of input data.

But the hemispheres are an ultimately an equal couple and the scientific revolution has recently, as an adjunct, given rise to visual icons; video games, pics, and movies all of which stimulate the vision of the right hemisphere as does, now ubiquitously-available, music.  This current significant increasing stimulation of the right hemisphere is largely an offspring of the Internet.

Again: The right hemisphere is “Life”and “We” and “Love” and “Big Picture” and “Music” and “Creativity” and “Nature”.

Right Brain Exercises       Contemplating Love

 Enjoy it!

 

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