Echo Chambers and Brain Atrophy
IT'S GOTTA BE A THING
My wife was getting a hearing test at her audiologist the other day. As things were wrapping up, it occurred to me that this doctor might not have heard one of my two “go-to” jokes. It seemed very relevant and she said that she’d be glad to hear my “one minute joke.” I reassured her I would stop, if and when she recognized it. As it turned out, she’d never heard it before, and it was great to see such a subdued person having an actual laugh.
So . . . . . Jack and his doctor friend, Ben, were on a play date at the local golf course. As they took a break at the ninth hole, Jack confided that his wife was losing her hearing, and he asked if Ben would check her out the next time she was at the office.
Doc had a better idea. He suggested, “How about you just do a simple hearing test, when you get home tonight. You know she’ll be in the kitchen cooking, so, when you’re in the front foyer, call out with an average volume - ‘Honey I’m home, what’s for dinner?’ If she doesn’t answer, do the same thing when you’re in the living room. And then if she doesn’t answer there, try it one more time at the door to the kitchen. Just let me know how it goes.”
Well Harry thought that was a grand idea, so after nine more holes and two beers, he went home, opened the front door and called out - “Honey I’m home, what’s for dinner?” No response. He repeated it in the living room - still nothin’. He loves this woman, so he even said it a little louder as he saw her draining some noodles at the sink. “Honey I’m home - what’s for dinner?”
And at that point she spun around blasting, “For the third time - Hi Jack, we’re having spaghetti.”
On the way home, Emily marveled that she, an audiologist, hadn’t heard that joke before. Within a minute though, she caught herself. Because Emily had endured it so many times, she made the knee jerk assumption that others had heard it at least once. That would be a reasonable subconscious conclusion, but then the insightful part of her brain kicked in and booted that thought to the curb.
Unfortunately, the insightful part of the brain may not always get to express itself, or maybe the right part of the brain has become completely subordinate to the more analytical left hemisphere.
According to Simon M. McCrey in his 2010 article entitled - “Intuition, insight, and the right hemisphere” -
“Intuition is the ability to understand immediately without conscious reasoning, and is sometimes explained as a ‘gut feeling’ about the rightness or wrongness of a person, place, situation, temporal episode or object. In contrast, insight is the capacity to gain an accurate and deep understanding of a problem and it is often associated with movement beyond existing paradigms.”
Intuition and insight seem to both be lacking in 2023, as so many of us are witnessing a disconnect between what people see and hear with our own eyes and ears and what they reportedly believe.
After Emily realized how silly her assumption and reasoning were, she recounted how one of her old friends from childhood was messaging her on Facebook about the “discovery” that “abortion clinics have been selling aborted fetuses on the black market.” My wife, being incredulous about this, commented that she hadn’t seen anything like this on any of the major news networks. Her friend’s response was - “It’s all over the internet.”
What she should have said is - it’s all over My internet. My objective is not to get into a discussion of the merits of the reporting or the issue, it’s merely to say -
Whether we want to acknowledge it or not - we all live in echo chambers.
I remember reading an article maybe six months ago comparing Trump and DeSantis, and I had assumed the author must have been mistaken when they said that the former president had strongly supported the effort to address the AIDS crisis. So I fact-checked the issue. To my surprise, I quickly discovered - May 9, 2019 — “Trump administration secures historic donation of billions of dollars in HIV prevention drugs.”
Doing only a few more minutes of internet searching, I came across the following in the Journal “Science.”
How HIV/AIDS ended up in Trump's State of the Union speech
Top public health officials didn’t expect idea to get high-profile endorsement
6 FEB 2019
“The people who planted the seed that led President Donald Trump to announce a new agenda to end AIDS in his State of the Union address yesterday, had no notion that their idea would receive this kind of prime-time attention.
Last summer, a few months after taking the helm of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta in April 2018, Robert Redfield met with Anthony Fauci, who heads the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Maryland. One topic of discussion was their vision of how to better coordinate the federal government's response to the country's HIV/AIDS epidemic and to help bring it to an end. "We got together and said this can work, let's start pushing it," Fauci tells Science Insider.
About 2 months ago, Fauci and Redfield took their idea to their boss, Alex Azar, who leads the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in Washington D.C., and his top deputy, Brett Giroir. "Alex really, really liked it," Fauci says. "He said, ‘I think we can bring this to the president.' We said, ‘Wow, wouldn't that be interesting.' The president was very excited about it and said, ‘Let's do it.'" (Fauci, incidentally, says he has developed friendships with all five previous presidents, but has yet to meet Trump.)”
Again, my goal here isn’t to get into the specifics of the former or current president’s efforts.
Donald Trump made a serious effort to address the AIDS issue and it should have been on everyone’s news feed and featured on every news outlet. It was a significant movement in the right direction.
The same should be said for things like the largest legislation ever passed to address climate change by the current president, Joe Biden.
Both of these achievements became political footballs instead of nationally celebrated bipartisan accomplishments. Both issues are existential threats for millions of people. Neither attainment was perfect, but I would have thought that fireworks and parades would have been in order.
A substantial part of our problem with residing in echo chambers is that all too often we fail to recognize that we’re in one. I want to go on record as saying that I fully acknowledge that I’m maintaining a fairly secure echo chamber myself. But time is limited and it’s extremely time consuming to shovel through conspiracy laden, non-evidence-based bullshit.
If I get reincarnated into a another world where we have an additional six hours per day, I promise to devote at least half of those hours exploring other people’s echo chambers.
Another reason that the echo chamber is so effective at keeping us ensnared, is that we typically make such token efforts to escape it. IF we were to merely pay attention to the language used by the sources we respect and or explore, we would recognize the blatant potential for major bias and the prejudiced representation of other people’s views.
For instance, if supposedly trusted sources were to refer to conservative people as “MAGots” or liberal people as “leftists,” beware of profound bias, sweeping generalizations and complete disdain for people with different opinions. I never thought of myself as privileged when it came to my upbringing, but I guess I was. By eighth grade, even my least tolerable peers had stopped calling people names.
Both of the above are catch-all terms used for the sole purpose of dividing us further and have nothing to do with enlightening people or truth telling. Such name-calling attempts to paint a broad brush over the worst of extremes, with the hopes of normalizing the terms and the respective repulsive associations that go with them.
I will admit that echo chambers and tribalism may have their place in the service of short-term and self-serving goals. But our world in 2023 is mired in division, the threat of nuclear annihilation, and environmental self-destruction. It doesn’t need more division.
Could we possibly be so blind as to not see that?
Our world needs a critical mass of people getting past their most primitive, fear-based selves to boldly tackle huge, real problems. And as I’ve said before, the ball is in our court, whether we want to play or not.
You are right about the echo chambers. I am the furthest thing from a conspiracy theorist, but I have done the work, and I can say with certainty that the echo chambers poisoning our minds in the USA have been carefully crafted by state actors with varying agendas. The algorithms poisoning our existence are crafted. By tribes that wish us harm. Some of those tribes live next door or within our borders.