Friday 25 August 2017

Words have power because you can't ignore them

One of the most difficult things in life can be learning when/how to ignore other people and blocking out things they say or the effect they have on you. It is a sad fact that in most conversations you have with people, that go beyond the very basic or mundane, the person you are conversing with will have some form of agenda that is not necessarily aligned with your own. These thoughts can, over time, get embedded under your brain and become difficult to shift. Like some clawing little beast inside your mind, you can't even remember why it is you suddenly feel the need to do something. It feels like a compulsion that you can't tie down until suddenly it hits you, this is because of that conversation you had with that weird guy in the uni lab isn't it. You remember, that one where he told you about his theory on life and how it's very fabric is affected by demon carrots and our zombie rabbit masters.

You see this is the danger of cognition and language. We hear, parse and understand language but we don't have some underlying system for processing it without it entering our brain first. It's not like the autonomous parts of the central nervous system, it has to actually fire neurons in our grey matter and get swirled around and reinforce the pathways that the thought takes. This means that simply by listening to an idea, even if it's complete garbage, we still run the risk of internalising it. This is the principle behind a lawyer blurting out something in a courtroom that is then stricken from the record. It was still heard and it will still influence the jury, whether they want it to or not.

This concept grows arms and legs when you consider that some people have things they want you to hear, even if they have no idea whether it's the best thing for you or whether the concept could cause you damage or get you in trouble. Words are a powerful thing and we would do well to not use them with complete abandon, as we most often do.

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