Positive thinking is part of the brain

CO S M I C U P LI N K



• MUKUL SHARMA

BEN Shahar, a happiness guru at Harvard whose “positive psychology” classes are being flocked to in the hundreds these days, seems to have an unnecessarily negative take on the media. “Most of the media,” he says in a Times News Network interview earlier this week, “focuses on what goes wrong: it reports extensively on Enron or Martha Stewart, or some fraud. But it doesn’t focus on the billions of honest transactions that take place everyday. And over time we begin to think that the negative is the norm, and that the exception is the good. So our minds get trained to focus on what is going wrong.”

He was replying to the interviewer’s question which said she had read somewhere that evolution had geared the human brain with a tendency towards negative thinking and, if so, could we condition it to think positively?

Firstly, a responsible media does not focus only on what goes wrong, rather it focuses on what is not commonplace, unoriginal or flat. The reason is because that’s what “news” means — new information of any kind; new things — events, occurrences or tidings. Fortunately or unfortunately, such things are not self-judgemental and, therefore, can be either positive or negative in their scope. Before 1991, for instance, the media quite regularly highlighted India’s economic shortcomings, since that was a given reality in those days. Today with the bread and butter business boom taking off like a rocket, the media consistently underscores the optimistic picture. In fact the Sunday Times top story on the day of Mr Shahar’s lament was ‘200 m phones and growing’.

Secondly, and more to the point, the human brain is definitely not geared with a tendency towards negative thinking. If anything, in evolutionary terms it would at most be blindly neutral in its development, favouring perhaps only that which could be beneficial to the body. Even after the rise of societies and civilisation, along with the emergence of the higher mental faculties of emotion, reasoning, judgement and the like, the tendency of the mind has been to move consistently towards the more affirmative and upbeat aspects of its world. And ultimately, with the growth of religiosity and the emergence of a maturing moral dimension, it has differentiated between good and evil and, historically, overwhelmingly chosen the former. The very fact that Shahar’s course for creating more positivity in our lives is breaking so many popularity records, speaks volumes about this.

source:- The Economic Times, CO S M I C U P LI N K
• MUKUL SHARMA