The Neuroscience Of How Personal Attacks Shut Down Critical Thinking

The Neuroscience of How Personal Attacks Shut Down Critical Thinking

I in my research on the harmful effects of ad hominem came across an online post that seems to support my theory that ad hominem harms the ability to learn and think of the person USING it .

I have been persuaded by my research specifically on how Scientologists are implanted to be close minded and prejudiced as a way to manipulate them that has shown me the terrible effects on them ( and their victims ) to seriously consider the very real possibility that in human relations and interactions ALL hate and hate influenced thought and behavior may in fact be IMPAIRED !


This - if true - could be an amazing scientific reason to avoid and try to limit hate as much as possible for REASON and not some esoteric ideal !


In other words to think well you may need to get the hate out !

It would to me be a revolutionary idea if science strongly supports eliminating hate and prejudice to free up critical and independent thinking and it would be much easier to teach than something like - hate is bad or good people do not hate etc.


In other words it may not just have a moral basis but instead an ENTIRELY logical one !

Okay , here is the link : http://www.patheos.com/blogs/camelsw...ical-thinking/




I will show a few short quotes to show what this is about and hope we ALL look into this further !







Begin quote:
First we need to know a bit about two regions of the brain that are fairly at odds with one another.
The prefontal cortex, which…is in the front of the brain if you’re facing forward. And the limbic system, which… is a huge chunk of many regions in the center of the brain. The pre-fontal cortex is our executive function. It helps us plan and decide what actions best meet our needs and is responsible for social inhibition, personality, and processing new information. It’s the part that says “you could have garlic bread tonight but you also don’t want to sit alone in the corner”.


The limbic system…is responsible for emotions and formation of memory. It reminds you that you love garlic bread and you were really embarrassed, too, the last time you ate it and no one sat next to you. So the important point about these two areas is: activation of one region generally results in deactivation or inhibition of the other, so they have an inverse relationship. This is because in situations of low or moderate stress, the prefontal cortex inhibits the amygdala. The amygdala is responsible for emotions that relate to the four 4′s: fight, flight, feeding–and mating…


So it makes us feel things like fear, reward, and anger that normally the prefrontal cortex can respond to with a spot of reason and inhibition. In a normal, low stress situation, you want the garlic bread or the cookie, for example, but you can decide whether or not to eat it because your prefrontal cortex is still engaged. And as your stress level may increase it gets harder to make those choices. Your rational thought capacity is there less and less and less to police your emotions when stress increases.


And this is where things can get ugly. If something extremely stressful happens that lights up the amygdala, it has the power to shut down the prefrontal cortex completely. It has this fight or flight or freeze response…and it’s instantaneous. It’s something that evolved for situations in which there is no time for decision making. You can’t think about whether you want garlic bread, you have to drop it and run when you’re confronted with a tiger. And that’s incidentally why people don’t eat when they are stressed, and a lot of other things that happen to our body as part of the stress response.


So there are times, high stress times, when executive decision making processes go completely down to the count and our emotions take over. By threatening somebody, whether it’s real or perceived, you can completely disable people’s their ability to think straight. And this isn’t all or nothing, it’s on a continuum. A threat can be anything that causes stress from the tiger to just an uncomfortable thought. The level of stress will influence the amount of rational thought vs. emotion that’s available and it’s totally subjective to the perceived experience of stress. End quote .








I found evidence to support this from a psychology/influence/ mind control model on my own BUT neuroscience is far , far more accepted and frankly in some ways reproducible in a lab than my reading and figuring and comparing Scientology etc. largely through thought .


Now , what I know about brain regions etc. would not fill a thimble BUT if the simple ideas of the differing brains and their role in evolution and the differing functions they serve and the critical factor's theoretical link to them is accurate ...then it is a VERY short jump to say this GREATLY supports my general " hate thought " is bad thought idea !





Now to support this even more I have found a Ted talk that has ...similar ideas explained in a VERY simple fashion .

I will attach both a PDF of the talk and the link to the actual talk -first the pdf :http://us.mensa.org/learn/gifted-you...aders-inspire/








and now the talk : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sioZd3AxmnE
The link did not come here as it should have , the link is a Tedtalk By Simon Sinek entitled Start With Why on Youtube . The 18:05 version .







Somewhere a Star Trek fan is saying " SEE the Vulcans were right ! "


I hope to find anything I can ( within reason ) that supports OR debunks this !


I want to note that I feel this has direct bearing on ad hominem and the methods of thought influencing and stopping Hub used in Scientology .

Now the limbic brain idea is not new , but for me the implication of some feelings and ideas so severely influencing thought and behavior is certainly something I never was exposed to in my earlier education .


Please let me know if YOU see this as the same - incorrect or already a known commodity .




If this basic idea is true it has implications to me for ALL future human interaction - IF both true AND taught to people .

Last edited by mockingbird; 25th November 2014 at 02:37 PM.

Mockingbird's Nest : http://mbnest.blogspot.com/search?up...08:00&max-resu


stuff at ESMB
http://www.forum.exscn.net/showthrea...390#post989390