Mind is the creation and maintainance of associations. This is only my theory, but I think this model works pretty well. Since our will plays a large role in creating and continually keeping in existence these artificial associations, we have a good control over them. So, it doesn't surprise me when neurological research comes to the conclusion that "people can train themselves to be happy".
For instance, have you noticed that, once you have an angry reaction (or an anxious reaction) to a certain type of event the first time, then your response to its second occurrence is more likely to be angry (or anxious)? And you can also see that, if you manage to alter that response once, again that will result in an altered response more likely to happen thereafter.
What do I mean by "mind is the creation and maintainance of associations"? Here it is. Why should the thought that tomorrow is a particular date (25 December, or the date of our birthday) make us feel happy? Why should the colour black in certain circumstances make us feel sad? Because we have created a link between a particular thought and another, which provokes a given emotion.
Why should the thought that tomorrow is a particular date (25 December, or the date of our birthday) make us feel happy? Why should the colour black in certain circumstances make us feel sad?
This is also how phobias develop. A totally innocuous object can provoke fear if it gets strongly associated to something which would normally cause fear. And this is how traumas are born. A person who has suffered due to a particular event may have developed a whole series of associations with that event, so that when any of these other associations are aroused or called to memory, the suffering of the original event comes back. I'm not saying here that the mind creates associations, that association-creation is the mind's activity.
I'm saying that THE MIND IS NOTHING BUT THE CONSTANT MAKING, DEVELOPMENT, RECOLLECTION AND, CONVERSELY, DESTRUCTION OF ASSOCIATIONS, from the moment we're born to the moment we die. This ever-expanding network of links between ideas, emotions, behaviors, reactions IS the mind. This is why the mind of a newborn baby is so ineffective, and its power grows over time, as the network spreads.
To get back to the question of emotional responses, our biology predisposes us to have a determined emotion in certain circumstances. For example, we are irritated if we're hungry and cannot find anything to eat. Then, in the normal course of our mental activity, we create a new link to that original stimulus: in our example, not finding food. Let's say (it's just an imaginary case) that one day when we're particularly hungry we open a red tin box in our kitchen where we expect to find biscuits and there's nothing there. We feel irritation, which is the biological response to frustration of an instinctive need. Let's say that, in our (very) imaginary example, from that moment we have an inexplicable irritation for the colour red. We've created a link between frustration and the tin box, and then between the box and its colour. We could then go on, and refrain from looking at the particular shelf in our kitchen where we keep biscuits tins. In the end, our mind works almost totally with these new thoughts and respond to them as if they were the original, biological stimulus.
We need only very, very few basic, instinctive, innate emotions, and we can develop a billion new artificial ways to evoke them. In the same way that they are created, these artificial associations can be destroyed, and maybe reformed again, and then unmade and so on. It's the life of the mind. It's a mechanism very similar to that of conditioned reflex.
It's the mechanism exploited by the advertising industry: associating something that evokes pleasant feelings, perhaps of a sexual nature, or perhaps of social acceptance and gratification, with the product one wants to sell. It's the reason why sometimes we love or hate a certain pop song: it may have nothing to do with its musical value or lack of it, but merely with the associations (the memories) connected with it. The very same song we may like and then dislike (or viceversa) if its association linkage changes, according to what its particular position in our memory world happens to be. A lover who becomes an ex-lover, perhaps? Or a period of our life which we now regard as beautiful, and earlier on we thought painful?
|
|
|
