Diary: Learned Responses

The brain is wired in such a way that we will find something shocking, only if it is not a something we have been well exposed to.
If we have a memory of an event, then when we encounter the event the next time, our brain will just output the learned response (the same response we had the last couple of times) and not trigger any mechanism which gives us the feeling of shock or surprise.
So if we hear about deaths on TV and we are shocked the first time but we respond by just carrying on with our lives then the brain learns to be more blase about such facts.
This is manifest by the level of fear you feel when you see insects. As a kid a lot of us are scared by insects, but if we are forced to live among roaches, as a lot of kids in the developing world do, then we slowly overcome our fears. This is a learned response.
I think this is also manifest in the way people age. When you are young, you are enraged by any kind of injustice happening in any corner of the world. As you grow older you still have a logical reaction to it but you don't get the same feelings you did as when you were young. It could also be that as we grow older we learn that, some situations are immutable and just a function of human social behavior (which is far away from the ideal world that our brains can imagine). But again the initial response is a learned reponse from the brain.


Thought triggered by the program "Now" on PBS (www.pbs.org)

Sources :
Phantoms in the brain - Dr. VS Ramachandran
On Intelligence - Jeff Hawkings



Afterthoughts:
The conclusions here seem so trivial when I pen it down, but as I was thinking about it, it seemed to be a very intersting thought.