Sometime back a leading national news channel was carrying a live coverage of a bizarre incident. A boy was trapped inside a tube well (borewell) and a cameraman and the crew were at the spot beaming live pictures. The attempt was futile and the boy died. Many VIPs had visited the place. The story was beamed for the next few days. There were discussions by intellectuals on what needs to be done to stop such incidents in the future. The leading dailies carried the news on the front page, as expected. Good Samaritans were busy collecting money and trying to bring some solace to the shattered family members. Fair enough.
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| Dr. Hrishikesh Damle |
There was another story buried inside the inner pages of the same newspaper. It was about eleven boys who were washed away in floods in Bihar. There was TV crew covering the floods, there were newspaper reports. But the tragedy of eleven boys being washed away was just one liner in the description of catastrophe. Probably no VIP visited their
families, no compensation reached them. Why are we so different to these two stories?
Despite being the most intelligent animal on earth, we are still susceptible for emotional deception. Across the world it has been proved that human hearts move and respond to the agony of one child as against many children. It is difficult to raise funds to feed thousands of children suffering in Africa but relatively easy to find donors for the treatment of a child suffering from blood cancer. Let’s confirm it for ourselves. Close your eyes for a moment now and try to recall two of the four events which have been described so far. The first one to come to your mind would either be “child suffering from blood cancer” or “boy in the borewell”. That’s why television channels carried the right story.
The media knows which event appeals people more than the other. So eleven boys were sidelined against one boy in the borewell for want of TRPs. Our brain, having been wired in a peculiar way, lets people take a ride on us. But the business of emotions doesn’t stop there. At times it is not deliberately done. Blame it on the structure of our brain, we are woven so much in the web of emotion that it is difficult for us to analytically evaluate the events. If you closely watch, much of the communication between the seller and the client touches buyer’s emotions at some level. After a surgery when a surgeon declares to the relatives that despite the procedure being tricky, risky and time-consuming, it went on well; he is laying the foundation for justification of his exorbitant fee. For a moment the relatives go into trance to recover moments later with a sigh of relief. Smart, isn’t it?
A few years back, one of my friends, a clinical psychologist, quizzed me to understand new perspectives of our choices. His first question was “Does your son wear the most expensive dress or most comfortable dress as his first choice?” Obviously all parents would admit that children go for latter than the former. His next question was “Do you dress to impress others?” It was a big “No” from my side. Come to think of it, that’s not true. We are not at our best attire on a Sunday morning at home. We do rush to the dressing room and improve our clothes, quite often if not all the times, when not so familiar guests arrive at our door. The confession is, we dress up to impress others as much as for our own sake. If you keenly observe, that’s what apparel commercials keep telling you on the television. They have influenced your psyche and kindled your emotions so much that you are captivated in the clutches of fancy brands. They do it with just twenty seconds of commercial, crafted with brilliant words and sticky visuals. In a professional world, it is easy to ward it off
as a branding exercise without realizing the innate changes it brings in our perceptions. Perhaps, many so-called cultures of the world and associated rituals are outcome of such emotional manipulations.
It is easy to watch a television show beamed in the language best known to us even in a noisy household. But if you are watching an English movie, you need to be a bit more observant (For most of us Indians, English being the second language of preference, this example) and may request others to be quiet and let you focus. Does it mean that English channels are less clear than the regional channels? Definitely not. Basically we understand most part of the dialogues through a combinational effort of reading lip movements and phonetic outcome. Our brains can make a guess on the word much before the word has been completed. Construction of the sentence, sayings, idioms and phrases are so familiar to us, we do not really need to listen to the audio completely. But watching a foreign accent, with unfamiliarity to their expressions, warrants us to observe carefully before things sink into our heads. This kind of automatism does exist in every part of our lives and reflects in our day-to-day businesses as well. We carry a baggage of pre-conceived notions about the kind of personalities we deal with or the way we are suppose to carry out the businesses. Urban rich becomes our primary target of business till someone comes with a book on “Bottom of the pyramid”.
Automatism has crept into every walk of our business. The distinct advantage of automatism can be appreciated in human ability of driving a car. Driving is a spontaneous activity of humans which requires a perfect co-ordination of visual and auditory stimuli, understanding of temporal measurements and a good feel of the vehicular movement which culminates into good reflexes in controlling the vehicle on the road. Similarly the experts in a special field imbibe enormous amount of data on the subject and use them subconsciously as much as consciously to find solutions to specific problems. We can call true mentors as individuals whose right instincts are to be attributed to enormous amount of subconscious computing taking place which is difficult to be expressed on a piece of paper. They have insights which are right responses created after having understood the most probable outcome of the same or similar activity. That’s why an experienced individual finds it a cakewalk to repeat an endeavor while a novice finds it to be humungous task.
Though automatism is a part of our life, we have several mechanisms to counter such behaviors. Challenging once own thoughts and deeds keeps happening in our brain’s factory. It is left to us to constantly harness such abilities and improve upon ourselves constantly. A simple example, though derogatory on outcome, can verify this argument.
All of us wish to wake up early in the morning and start our day. The alarm buzzes sincerely by 5:00 am as set by you. You wish to wake up but your body says no. You press snooze button a few times and end up waking up by 6:30. Here mainly your body was influencing your mind to postpone the most desired task of the morning. Similarly our right brain and left brain contradict and keep providing options to us to choose. This has been demonstrated, during earlier days, in patients whose left and right hemispheres use to be divided as a treatment for epilepsy. In such individuals the left and the right hand use to disagree with several tasks. It was observed that, in such split brain patients, there were incidents when the left hand picked the phone receiver, the right hand grabbed it and hanged it down! There are also constant emotional and analytical arguments in our brain between new evolved human brain and rudimentary systems left over from animals.
Though emotions make ultimate decisions, they can be influenced efficiently by our analytical skills, thinking abilities, planning and decision-making apparatus. The more we use them, the more prolific masters we can be in our business. After years of experience, these tasks get embedded in our ‘brain’s circuitry’ enabling us to make spontaneous decisions like a seasoned pro. That’s the stage of automatism of mentors. That’s when we understand the emotions of others and start ruling them.
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Dr. Hrishikesh Damle is a first generation entrepreneur. He is CEO of Atrimed, a pharmaceutical company.
To write to the author, please send an email to dare@cybermedia.co.in with the subject line 'Dr. Hrishikesh Damle'.
Disclaimer: The views expressed here are that of the author and do not represent the magazine's.
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