Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Thinking before acting

My blogs would state to you the obvious, that we are all influenced by hype and advertising. What I am going to tell you more that we are influenced to the extent that it becomes a question of our survival. It is instinctual tendency of an animal to listen to most loud sound and look towards it . Once we find that out , we start rationalizing the fact that since the sound is the loudest , it definately makes a logical sense that what it is trying to tell us must be true. Since the loudness of the sound dims our capability to reason well, we tend to assume that whatever someone is telling us is correct

If you do not believe that humans dont think much before taking an action please look around . Look at the drivers on the roads who are driving smart computer controlled cars. These cars are supposed to be safe and intelligent by providing the driver with maximum amout of control but it is not the car but the human sitting on the steering that is careless. In one of the shows in discovery channel , the narrator informed that the more safe cars are becoming , the more recless drivers are .

In normal circumstance, if you stop a driver and ask him , if it is good to drive safe, the answer would be definately in positive. But the same driver when he gets hold of the car starts behaving in exactly opposite way.

That brings us to the question , how are we different from animals. We have almost all the instincts of animals such as Fear , greed, hunger, thirst etc etc. In the evolution of the mankind , our body has evolved to perform complex mind functions such as solving puzzles, holding a cutting knife in right position , flying a plane and many others . However, we are not able to let go of the instincts that we brought upon our transformation of the animal world. Everywhere in the world finance, wars ,sports , we see that all these factors come into picture. They help us survive in the competition for food, mates and shelter. But there is one more thing that we have more than all animals , which is our thinking . We as a fairly evolved beings can think before we act. Unfortunately that is not very easy. We are conditioned by our environment to suppress our thinking . We also look to our past to prepare our future responses , which is okay when it comes to iproving your behaviour such asbeing more polite or be diplomatic however is not useful when it causes us not to take good amount of risk to get a higher reward . For e.g. if a father beats up a child for no reson regularly , the child will not come to father for even simple requests.

Our thinking before acting may sometimes acts a best response. There are times when we want to do damage, beat someone or say nasty things for a moment, we pause . This gives our brain time to think and the damage is not done. It is quite possible that the response we have is not the best response. We would like to inflict some harm on the opponent and that may be needed. But think of the other consequences that would have arised out of it . So we have chosen a response we have decided as mature adult and not as enraged person. We can even frame anassertive response , which can rightly affect our opponent.

There are a lot of practical applications of thinking and making an informed decision based on whatever information we have and not at the spur of the moment. It can save us with lot of hassles later on.

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