be smart about media

Media, Science, and the Brain

How We May Be Led to Know

What Isn’t So

Reality isn’t what it used to be.

People are catching on to that.

The purpose of this website is to bring to the level of common understanding what media scholars and others from various fields have been demonstrating behaviorally for years—that reality and media message are constructed by the brain. In other words this is about media meets modern neuroscience.

Most so called media literacy sites attempt to suggest that media messages are purposely constructed to influence the recipients’ thinking and hint that this has some tinge of evil intent. This website will refute that view with the notion that ALL messages must be ABOUT something, and as each of us attempts to express ourselves we may consciously but also unconsciously construct a message that in fact uses a frame—that is, selects certain aspects of reality and obscures or eliminates others. That process is inherent in narrative. We further will seek to illustrate how frames tend to drive public policy—particularly as media adopts a dominant frame as sometimes does and other times does not occur.

We will look into subjects as varied as media culture, the empirical research on media effects,media culture,and values plus what modern neuroscience is telling us about how the brain constructs information that comes in through the senses to develop a narrative picture in politics, medicine, law, and other fields.

Eventually we will apply this perspective to how conventional public perceptions have come to be shaped about such topics as, terrorism, political Islam and others.

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Believing is Seeing—Some examples:

I look. You look. He look. They look.

Charles Dickens put these words into the mouth of an untutored cabin boy to signify all the different viewpoints needed in our struggle to see what is “out there,” that is ,what is reality.

The senses take in: the brain constructs(according to it’s preferences built over a lifetime )

Thus are Perception and Reality rendered not the same.

The folly of failure to consider all the viewpoints –a folly our brains seems to prefer—particularly stands out in cases of espionage and war --as history obligingly illustrates.

In June 1941 Stalin refused to prepare his country for war with Germany because he persisted in the view that Hitler would not betray him—despite the evidence being brought back from the Russian-German border where three great army groups with more than three million German soldiers, 150 divisions, and three thousand tanks were massing to smash across the frontier into Soviet territory on June 22, 1941.

In the wake of the Yom Kippur War, the Israeli government appointed a special investigative commission, and one of the witnesses called was Major General Zeira, the head of aman. Why, they asked, had he insisted that war was not imminent? His answer was simple:

The Chief of Staff has to make decisions, and his decisions must be clear. The best support that the head of AMAN can give the Chief of Staff is to give a clear and unambiguous estimate, provided that it is done in an objective fashion. To be sure, the clearer and sharper the estimate, the clearer and sharper the mistake—but this is a professional hazard for the head of AMAN.

The historians Eliot A. Cohen and John Gooch, in their book “Military Misfortunes,” argue that it was Zeira’s certainty that had proved fatal: “The culpable failure of aman’s leaders in September and October 1973 lay not in their belief that Egypt would not attack but in their supreme confidence, which dazzled decision-makers. . . . Rather than impress upon the prime minister, the chief of staff and the minister of defense the ambiguity of the situation, they insisted—until the last day—that there would be no war, period.”

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See especially:

March 10, 2003 IssuevThe New Yorker

Connecting the Dots

The paradoxes of intelligence reform.

By Malcolm Gladwell

March 2.2003

Media Literacy : Essential to Democracy How to Escape the Doleful/ Morbid Symptoms of Media Hype .

...and Understand What is Going ON in the World at a time when the Old Brain is being swamped by the New Media

Warning: It is not simple and it is definitely painful. Because as humans we are reluctant to give up long held ideas particularly as a swap for mere ambiguity.

So…here goes.

People around the world and throughout the ages have looked at the same thing and seen different things. Sometimes that even kill each other over it but mostly they just disasgree.

Perhaps the most familiar version of this can be seen in humor. One person looks at something which he sees as very funny but the other person not at all.

Why the differerence?

The eminent biologist and neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky has a chart for that.

The chart presents all the influences shaping the filters we develop that determines how we see the world:

Journalists need to know and understand this

Media consumers need to know and understand this.