You are what you listen to: We can learn in different ways

A teacher once told me, “You can only remember and reason with what has gone in, in the first place.”From the womb on, our brain acts like a sponge, desperately craving input, information, knowledge. In some the pace of input is slower than others, in some the quantity of input is higher and in some the discrimination (filters) over input is more capable. Your parents guided you in early years, “You don’t want to take all that advice from Johnny, he’s a bad boy.” But as you grew older, discrimination, volume and a desire to learn becomes your choice, and your choice alone.That same teacher told me, “Listen and learn.” What I came to understand is that reading is listening to the words in your head, watching is understanding what you see and then listening to your intellect’s interpretation, feeling is listening to your heart’s pangs and joys and what the ears deliver needs the same filter of intellect before you “listen” and store the information away. In the end, you become that which you listened to, stored away, whether it be sight, sound, feeling or taste. That is why learning, learning how to think, to think for oneself, is so critical. There is one lesson parents need to pass to their kids, and teachers need to pass to their pupils, it is learning how to think, to process all that input before accepting it.The brain is your most precious organ. It is like the safety-vault of your life. What you store in there determines every function of your body. That is why mental illness is so crippling, why PTSD for soldiers and victims of violence can alter their very essence, their physical well-being. Simply put, their safety vault has been compromised, who they were has become tainted by what they listened to. Nowadays, if you haven’t learned the lifesaving knack of learning how to think, you are like an unvaccinated child in a disease-ridden hospital ward. You’re going to catch something, maybe everything. And people may look at you and think you’re weird or so far out there as to be considered unbalanced. And in a way you may be, if unbalanced means your hitherto brain was compromised by the intrusion of something so radical and unbalancing that it threw you off-kilter.That’s what brainwashing is all about, or waterboarding torture; it so bombards the brain with input that thinking is impossible. and streams of violent data stream in wreaking havoc with previous thought patterns and storage. Think of a whirlwind in a bank vault with piles of new notes. Everything gets jumbled, flies around, chaos; a broken mind.When trying to understand major issues of today, people are often faced with re-examining what they thought were safely stored true-isms, things they could rely on as untainted. “Stay out of the cold or you’ll catch your death,” no longer works to ward off colds or the flu. We now know better, time to readjust our thinking. “Cover your mouth when you sneeze” — well, yes, but then don’t touch anything as your hand is infected. We learn all the time, adjust thinking, modify stored thoughts.It could be said that if you still believed either of those two quotes, you are unbalanced. Why? Because updated information is common knowledge, and either you are not listening for updates or you are not thinking well enough to accept the updates. In either event, you are out of balance with current societal thinking and knowledge. Does that mean you are crazy? No, this is a simple example, but if you take it to an extreme, it could flag a real problem.“They all had to die,” is a horrible thought from a man with a military weapon (I hate the term assault weapon because it means nothing — a military weapon should only be in the hands of one carefully trained in its use). Clearly this statement shows a deranged mind, but is it really? Such people often were rational, quiet people. The problem was with their capability of thinking and reasoning. You can only reason with what was allowed in. And if you didn’t learn how to think, to assess input, in the first place, or if doctors prescribe drugs which may warp that reasoning capability, then what gets into the vault is especially dangerous.Think what is out there in our modern world of hate talk radio and violent media, commonly available to such people. In the end, the tool is a worry, but unfettered input far more so. Until we realize that the balance of receptive minds is always at risk, society as a whole is at risk of unbalancing itself in a rush to allow everything. Sometimes, mom was right, “Turn that off, I don’t want you listening to that garbage.”Peter Riva, a former resident of Amenia Union, now lives in New Mexico.