Powerful Minds

The readings this week about the different ways our minds can effect us has really made me think about the media's overwhelming impact on our minds. I find it very interesting that simply believing something as fact can change the entire way our brains operate. For example, believing a white coat belongs to a doctor or a painter suddenly adds significance to it in our minds, and therefore makes our brains operate differently when we put it on. The same thing happens when we believe what we see in media to be true. The Internet, Newspapers, and TV feed us information about topics that we believe to be true, and therefore our minds begin to orient around those "facts."

Just like the men who believed their masculinity was threatened, we as a culture orient our minds around perceived truths that are fed to us by the media and we begin acting on what we believe to be true. I see this in our gender roles, where the more women see commercials about products being equivalent to beauty and television shows portraying a woman's worth as how much men want to have sex with her, the more women believe their worth lies in their physicality, and the more likely they are to orient their lives around maintaining or increasing their beauty.

It is sad to think that many of the "truths" that our minds believe could actually be lies. Thinking about North Korea and propaganda (which someone brought up in class, but I can't remember who), statements of truth can be easily faked, and when believed as true by a whole body of people, it can be hard to change that mindset. Media in North Korea, which has fed lies to their people about the world, the US, and their leaders, has uniquely forged a nation of people who have oriented their entire lives around their leader, simply because they believe something about him to be true. The mind is truly a powerful thing, but the media has such a huge influence on our minds.