Arda Sever
@Saccha
15 okur puanı
Ekim 2019 tarihinde katıldı
While it's difficult for a politician to tell parents that their son died for no good reason, it is far more painful for parents to say this to themselves - and it is even harder for the victims. A crippled soldier who lost his legs would rather tell himself, 'I sacrificed myself for the glory of the eternal Italian nation!' than 'I lost my leg because I was stupid enough to believe self-serving politicians.' It is much easier to live with the fantasy, because the fantasy gives meaning to the suffering.
Priests discovered this principle thousands of years ago. It underlies numerous religious ceremonies and commandments. Of you want to make people believe in imaginary entities such as gods and nations, you should make them sacrifice something valuable.
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Given the unbearable torments that many women undergo during childbirth, one might think that after going through it once no sane woman would ever agree to do so again. However, at the and of labour and in the following days the hormonal system secretes cortisol and beta-endorphins, which reduce the pain and create a feeling of relief and sometimes even of elation. Moreover, the growing love towards he baby and the acclaim from friends, family members, religious dogmas and nationalist propaganda, conspire to transform childbirth from a terrible trauma into a positive memory.
Some of the most notable studies on these split-brain patients were conducted by Professor Roger Wolcott Sperry,who won the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for his groundbreaking discoveries, and by his student, Professor Michael S. Gazzaniga. One study was conducted on a teenage boy. The boy was asked what he would like to do when he grew up. The boy answered: be a draughtsman. This answer was provided by his left brain hemisphere, which plays crucial part in logical reasoning as well as in speech. Yet the boy had another active speech center in his right hemisphere, which could not control vocal language but could spell words using Scrabble tiles. The researchers were keen to know what the right hemisphere would say. So they spread Scrabble tiles on a table, and wrote on a piece of paper: 'What would you like to do when you grew up?' They placed the paper at the edge of the boy's left visual field. Data from the left visual field is processed in the right hemisphere. Since the right hemisphere could not use vocal language, the boy said nothing. But his left hand began moving rapidly across the table, collecting tiles from here and there, until it spelled out: 'automobile race'. Spooky.
But the million dollar question is not whether parrots and humans can act upon their inner desires - the question is whether they can choose their desires in the first place.
What, then, will happen once we realize that customers and voters never make free choices, and once we have the technology to calculate, design or outsmart their feelings? If the whole universe is pegged to the human experience, what will happen once the human experience becomes just another designable product, no different in essence from any other item in the supermarket?
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