Did you know that censorship hurts your brain?
Yes, it does, according to Barbara Oakley, Oakland University professor writing in the Wall Street Journal last month: “Our brains are built to form habits…deep learning circuits that automate whatever we repeat…also wired in patterns of thought. If the only messages we hear are one-sided, the brain’s habit circuits carve then into grooves of thought that resist change.”
“Rigidity at the neural level breeds rigidity at the civic level,” she explained. “Economists studying East Germany…found that decades of socialist rule left scars on behavior: Citizens became more cautious, less entrepreneurial, and slower to trust…”
“Neuroscience also shows that cognitive flexibility isn’t automatic. Like any skill, it must be trained…Ghent University cognitive scientist Senne Braem and colleagues showed that when people are rewarded for switching tasks, they later switch more readily—even without realizing why. When switching is discouraged, they become more rigid. Flexibility is like a muscle: it grows with practice, feedback and time.”
I assume that means use it or lose it.
“This helps explain why rigid beliefs can turn dangerous. Dogmatism and extremism go hand in hand with low cognitive flexibility and thing that resists correction.”
Oakley wrote much more, but at the end, she concluded that “Only the difficult habit of listening to contrary voices can make our minds—and our democracy—strong enough to endure.”
As I’ve written previously, preservation of our democratic way of life is largely dependent upon our own civic and social self-improvement, especially in the respect we have and appreciation for the merit of contrary points of view.
