About What We See and Hear

A mother happened to see her child imitating a mourner. Being shocked, the mother moved from near a graveyard to a house next to a market. Then, her child started imitating a merchant. So the mother packed up their stuff again and moved to a house near a school. From then on her child imitated reading books, and the mother was satisfied. This is the origin of the Chinese idiom 孟母三遷之敎 (meng mu san qian zhi jiao), meaning Mencius’ mother moves three times (for her son’s education), which contains the message that men are much influenced by what they see and hear.

Even a woman who used to like watching breathtaking scary movies and listening to loud music with uneven rhythms, tries to watch emotional and heartwarming movies and listen to calm and peaceful music once she gets pregnant. It is because what the fetus indirectly sees and hears through the mother’s body immensely influences its emotions. Then, it is needless to say how much what we directly see with our own eyes and hear with our own ears influences us.

We live in abundance of things to see and hear due to the development of information and communications and media. Hundreds of channels are on for 24 hours a day, and videos of personal broadcasting and of different content pour out like a flood every day. It is almost impossible to live with no contact with the media in this modern society. Then, what should we see and hear? It is not only a matter of an individual, but of the peace and happiness of the family.

What Comes in Through the Eyes and Ears Goes Out Through Words and Actions

In the 1960s, Albert Bandura, a Canadian-American psychologist, performed the Bobo doll experiment on children between ages three to six. A Bobo doll is a roly-poly toy that rocks back to an upright position after it has been knocked down. He observed the children’s behavior after letting them see an adult treating this doll aggressively, and also the behavior of the children who were not exposed to such an adult. The children who saw the adult abusing the doll were also aggressive to the doll, and those who were not put in that environment didn’t show aggressive behavior although there were items around them that could cause violence such as toy guns or toy knives.

An enterprise had a similar experiment by using AI technology. They reproduced two virtual children by cloning a five-year-old child through 3D technology, and let one of them see a video that reads stories, and the other one see random videos from a video sharing website.

After those two virtual children were exposed to different videos for eight weeks, they were interviewed. Their conversations were totally different from each other. The virtual child who was exposed to videos of high-quality content used creative expressions and gentle words, whereas the child who was exposed to indiscreet videos overused slang words and the vocabulary that mocks other people.

As these experiments show, children absorb what they see and hear like a sponge. Then, do the surroundings only affect children who are not fully grown yet?

A TV station had an experiment on adults; they divided the participants into two groups and had them make sentences by using word cards. The experiment was to see how the behavior of people change after being exposed to certain words. As a result, the group that was exposed to the words that are related to the elderly such as old and retirement savings walked two seconds more slowly on average than they did before the experiment; and the group that was exposed to the words that are related to young people such as challenging, passionate, and new recruit, walked two seconds faster on average than they did before the experiment.

Regardless of our intention, what comes inside us through our eyes and ears is to go out through our words and actions. Even adults with abundant knowledge and experience and discernment are no exceptions.

The Brain Changes According to What We See and Hear

About 80% of the information that the brain handles comes in through the eyes, and about 10% through the ears. When the eyes transmit the light that is reflected on an object, the cerebrum forms an image that we can see; and when the ears transmit the vibration of the air, we hear it as the sound that we can understand. In this process, the brain interprets and judges the new information, based on the experience from the past. In other words, the eyes and the ears only play the role of transmitting the visual and auditory information, and it is not too much to say that it is actually the brain that sees and hears.

It seems that the way the brain handles information is complicated, but it also has a simple side. The brain resists against new information, but feels good and trusts the information that it has received frequently. This is why most people buy products of name brands that they have seen in advertisements if they don’t have knowledge or information in that area. The Eiffel Tower in Paris was regarded as hideous when it was built and was in danger of being demolished, but as time went by, citizens got used to it and gave good response, that now it stands as an attraction. This is the origin of the “Eiffel Tower Effect” which means a phenomenon that likeability increases through repetitive exposure.

However, the problem is that the brain can accept everything indiscreetly without considering whether or not it is a fact and if it is harmful or beneficial, being blinded by familiarity. Moreover, the mirror neuron of the brain, which makes us feel empathy and copy what the eyes see, is more activated for the object we have a positive impression on. Therefore, the possibility to copy what others say and how they behave increases if they are familiar and favorable to us. This is why the surrounding environment often affects us more than our own will when deciding what to think and do.

There is a quote that goes, “You are what you eat.” If what we eat and drink becomes the basis of our bodies, what we see and hear becomes the basis of our minds and spirits. In other words, what we see and hear is accumulated and becomes us.

To Become a Good Person

Now we are living in the world of media, which is overflowing with stimulating content and unproven indiscreet information, and the content that focus on temporary fun. If you see and listen to anything as long as it gives momentary fun, it is as if you put any kind of food inside your mouth without checking whether it is harmful or beneficial to your body. This is why “Media Literacy” is on the rise.

Media literacy indicates the ability to discern information from all different types of media such as books, newspaper, radio, TV, and the Internet. People in the field of education say that education on media literacy is essential to prevent cyberbullying which is rising among students due to the increase of online classes.

Visual media has side effects when you are exposed to it too long even if it has beneficial content. Once the brain gets used to receiving visual and auditory stimuli in a short form through the visual media, the frontal lobe, which is in charge of deep thinking, weakens, and it can make you look for faster and stronger stimulation and get addicted to it. This is why it is more beneficial to the brain when you get the same information from the book than from the digital screen. Reading on actual paper activates bigger regions of the brain in the process of understanding the meaning of the content, which helps you have insight, concentration, and the power to think and widen your perspective on the world.

The amount of energy the brain can use for a day is limited. If the brain spends all its energy stimulating the peripheral nerves, it becomes hard to choose what is important and put it into action. The ability to discern whether or not something is good for you starts from being conscious of what to see and what to hear. In order to enjoy benefits from the media, you need to filter harmful or low-quality content, and stay near the things that can give hope and positive energy to you. When you see someone help, love, and consider others, you learn from them and do something good, too. In other words, you become a good person when you see and hear good things.

Most moms try to see and hear only good things for the fetuses in their wombs to grow bright and healthy. Since we all received such love, shouldn’t we now give ourselves good things? This is the best way to express gratitude to those who let us see and hear. This is also a way to love us and our precious family members as well.

If you know the importance of what you see and hear, you will be careful when you speak and act toward your family members, thinking of what influence will be brought upon them.

Instead of teaching your child to be a good person, you should be a good parent. Instead of wanting your spouse to be a good person, you should first make an effort to become a good person. Then, they will be close to the way you want them. There is a saying, “In the field of hemps which grow upright, even mugwort plants grow upright, too.” This applies to a field called home, too.