Tuesday 8 September 2015

Brainwashed!

"Not all that glitters is gold", is an old saying. It has many variations, and has its parallel or translation -I believe- in all the languages in the world. In Urdu we have: "ہر چمکنے والی چیز سونا نہیں ہوتی", and in Arabic: "ليس كل ما يلمع ذهباً". They all mean the same: that not everything that looks true turns out to be so, that our eyes may deceive. Optical Scientists find the pair of yoked prisms a good example for the deception of vision, or may be optical illusions are the example we can more easily understand. Yes, in the case of optical illusions we do not believe what we see because we have prior knowledge that they are mere illusions. But what if we do not posses that prior knowledge? We would then succumb to deception and start believing what we see.

Every day we are bombarded with images we do not have time to examine, and let ourselves believe they are true. Layers and layers of misconceptions are stacked in our brains, let they be images of a perfect body and skin, or of people belonging to a different religion; country; cast; or group. Media has the power to shape our thoughts. And it is doing it.

I do not remember whose theory it was that media is producing identical humans, or clones, but I am now sure it has some truth.

No comments:

Post a Comment