In the wake of the horrific killing at 'Sandy Hook Elementary' school, the predominant question knocking on our minds is "what makes a person shoot at innocent kindergartners?" I know people are talking about tougher gun regulations, armed guards at school premises and what not. The fact remains, parents who fed breakfast to their kids and sent them school on that day, many of them didn't get them back. The reason? what could be the reason? Is any reason, reason-enough to even accept? Media constantly updating on the events taking place after the shoot-out, who thinks what, pro-gun or anti-gun etc. etc. What this society should really think at this time is ways to connect and reach out. How we may prevent this kind of incidents from happening again? I mean there are mentally ill people everywhere, in every country. How many of them do mass murder? If we really want to look for reasons that cause this kind of ugly incidents, we need to look inside ourselves, what is hiding inside us. It is time we should take this effort to introspect and don't let the lives that are lost, become worthless. If we really take notice that something is wrong and needs to be fixed, those little ones who died on that fateful day, at least we will be able to attach some worth to the lives already lost. History will remember that American society changed after those little ones lost their lives. If you had the patience to read up to this, you are probably willing to read what I want to talk about in the following passages.
Let me refer to a news article published by ABC News on Jan 19, 2012 that says that one in five Americans suffer some kind of mental illness. That is according to a study published in 2010 by Substance abuse and Mental health services administration. Isn't that awesome? If you drop this kind of a statistics into the American society, how do you think they are going to react? They'll say "Wow...that's a big market for anti-depressants". Let's start selling mental health improvement products and get rich. This is the root cause of all your problems my friend. There needs to be a paradigm shift in the way we look at the world around us. It is this endless materialism, competition, lack of spiritual connection between us that leads us to the verge of insanity. I know many of us are religious, how many of us are spiritual for that real sense of the term? How many of us cared to look deep into ourselves and realize who we really are? Are we different from the homeless person on the street or the CEO of a big corporation who eats with a golden spoon? How many of us have unlocked the endless compassion, forgiveness and love dormant within ourselves? We haven't cared to. It is not because we cannot; we grow up in a way that prevents us from becoming human. We start sleeping separately from our parents as soon as we are born, so that our parents can have a good sex life. We don't spend our childhood playing with grandparents or uncles and aunts, instead we go to 'daycare' and start competing for toys and attention, learn fighting and grabbing stuff or else they will be taken. We go to schools where a lot of effort is given to teach us intelligent thinking, not developing 'emotional intelligence'. Accept it. Many of us haven't even heard of this term. We start believing that a career is to earn money, because that is what you need to live a fulfilling life. We need a nice car, a decent house, a pet that eats designer foods, a sexy girlfriend - who will be "neighbor's envy and owner's pride" (I quoted from a 'Onida' commercial from the 90s) and who will be our slave in bed. You need lots of money in your bank account too. the more the merrier. We are tricked into believing this is a good life. But no, it's not. This only takes us away from our natural human self. We start using supplements to have a great body, use enhancements, spike up our drinks with drugs, we get caught up so much in making our lives full of fun that we forget our spiritual self which is torn and injured every time we suffer an attack on our ego, every time our girlfriend leaves us for a newer pastures, every time we are laid off from a job, every time we are denied a credit for that wonderful vacation in Bahamas. My friends, try to understand, this is the cause of all the mental illness. Yes, I am talking about loneliness, sadness, depression, disorders leading to aggression, not Alzheimers or Parkinson's disease.
Now, let's look at the main aspect of our discussion - 'aggression'. According to researchers, the 'amygdala' in the vertebrate brain that belongs to the limbic system is the seat of all aggression humans display. Experiments done with individuals that has aggressive behavioral problems, show hyperactive amygdala. Surgically removing the amygdala or a part of the limbic system have greatly reduced aggression in those individuals. However, I wonder "aggression" which comes as a consequence of the 'fight or flight response' was initially a survival response in animal world. How come that is used in a different way in civilized societies?
My take on that, the answer lies in the way our brains are wired. Our brain works through neural interactions called 'connections', billions of them, called neural network. It is just training that builds a new connection, a new memory, learning a new skill, sensations, feelings...everything. There are areas of brain called 'lobes' predominantly housing networks for a particular function. However, these areas do talk to each other. We can actually wire them or associate them by training or practice. If we train our brain to become amused by listening to a particular music, it will associate or build connections that will enable us to enjoy music in a particular way. These associations can be simple like one to one or multiple, it can occur in layers, it can operate beyond our conscious control when eliciting a response to a particular situation or emotion. So, I believe, it is we who have associated our seat of aggression with our seats of pleasure, companionship, sense of reward, sense of possession, sense of individual freedom, sense of demand, sense of thought, sense of deprivation, sense of shame, sense of everything. The area which gets activated as a survival or threat to survival response, now gets activated in response to any other of these seemingly innocent feelings. In other words, we have trained our brains to think that our survival is at stake if we cannot achieve a particular thing or if we are not proud of ourselves, or if we are not getting enough attention, or society is not taking us seriously. Although it is far from reality, only way our brain responds is to display enormous aggression towards the society. We want to kill....kill a lots of people to feel better, to feel that my survival is not threatened. Yes, we call this a mental illness. But, let's take a deep look into ourselves. The shooter was one of us, and yes, we don't discuss this a lot, but he killed himself at the end.
Let me refer to a news article published by ABC News on Jan 19, 2012 that says that one in five Americans suffer some kind of mental illness. That is according to a study published in 2010 by Substance abuse and Mental health services administration. Isn't that awesome? If you drop this kind of a statistics into the American society, how do you think they are going to react? They'll say "Wow...that's a big market for anti-depressants". Let's start selling mental health improvement products and get rich. This is the root cause of all your problems my friend. There needs to be a paradigm shift in the way we look at the world around us. It is this endless materialism, competition, lack of spiritual connection between us that leads us to the verge of insanity. I know many of us are religious, how many of us are spiritual for that real sense of the term? How many of us cared to look deep into ourselves and realize who we really are? Are we different from the homeless person on the street or the CEO of a big corporation who eats with a golden spoon? How many of us have unlocked the endless compassion, forgiveness and love dormant within ourselves? We haven't cared to. It is not because we cannot; we grow up in a way that prevents us from becoming human. We start sleeping separately from our parents as soon as we are born, so that our parents can have a good sex life. We don't spend our childhood playing with grandparents or uncles and aunts, instead we go to 'daycare' and start competing for toys and attention, learn fighting and grabbing stuff or else they will be taken. We go to schools where a lot of effort is given to teach us intelligent thinking, not developing 'emotional intelligence'. Accept it. Many of us haven't even heard of this term. We start believing that a career is to earn money, because that is what you need to live a fulfilling life. We need a nice car, a decent house, a pet that eats designer foods, a sexy girlfriend - who will be "neighbor's envy and owner's pride" (I quoted from a 'Onida' commercial from the 90s) and who will be our slave in bed. You need lots of money in your bank account too. the more the merrier. We are tricked into believing this is a good life. But no, it's not. This only takes us away from our natural human self. We start using supplements to have a great body, use enhancements, spike up our drinks with drugs, we get caught up so much in making our lives full of fun that we forget our spiritual self which is torn and injured every time we suffer an attack on our ego, every time our girlfriend leaves us for a newer pastures, every time we are laid off from a job, every time we are denied a credit for that wonderful vacation in Bahamas. My friends, try to understand, this is the cause of all the mental illness. Yes, I am talking about loneliness, sadness, depression, disorders leading to aggression, not Alzheimers or Parkinson's disease.
Now, let's look at the main aspect of our discussion - 'aggression'. According to researchers, the 'amygdala' in the vertebrate brain that belongs to the limbic system is the seat of all aggression humans display. Experiments done with individuals that has aggressive behavioral problems, show hyperactive amygdala. Surgically removing the amygdala or a part of the limbic system have greatly reduced aggression in those individuals. However, I wonder "aggression" which comes as a consequence of the 'fight or flight response' was initially a survival response in animal world. How come that is used in a different way in civilized societies?
My take on that, the answer lies in the way our brains are wired. Our brain works through neural interactions called 'connections', billions of them, called neural network. It is just training that builds a new connection, a new memory, learning a new skill, sensations, feelings...everything. There are areas of brain called 'lobes' predominantly housing networks for a particular function. However, these areas do talk to each other. We can actually wire them or associate them by training or practice. If we train our brain to become amused by listening to a particular music, it will associate or build connections that will enable us to enjoy music in a particular way. These associations can be simple like one to one or multiple, it can occur in layers, it can operate beyond our conscious control when eliciting a response to a particular situation or emotion. So, I believe, it is we who have associated our seat of aggression with our seats of pleasure, companionship, sense of reward, sense of possession, sense of individual freedom, sense of demand, sense of thought, sense of deprivation, sense of shame, sense of everything. The area which gets activated as a survival or threat to survival response, now gets activated in response to any other of these seemingly innocent feelings. In other words, we have trained our brains to think that our survival is at stake if we cannot achieve a particular thing or if we are not proud of ourselves, or if we are not getting enough attention, or society is not taking us seriously. Although it is far from reality, only way our brain responds is to display enormous aggression towards the society. We want to kill....kill a lots of people to feel better, to feel that my survival is not threatened. Yes, we call this a mental illness. But, let's take a deep look into ourselves. The shooter was one of us, and yes, we don't discuss this a lot, but he killed himself at the end.
