Why be Thankful?

Why be Thankful?

By William Schaeffer

While taking a course on Information Theory the following factoid was presented:  “We tend to remember negative information more than positive information.”  In other words, a negative experience, or mishap, will be remembered much more “importantly” than a positive or neutral experience.   We give more “weight” (or value) to negative information than we give to positive or neutral information.

There are some good reasons for this.  The human mind is designed to perform optimally, not perfectly.  Being limited by space and processing speed, the mind has evolved algorithms of thought and information processing that it will use to perform with best possible results in a variety of conditions.

If we have a dangerous, or life threatening, experience then we will remember it vividly and we will seek to avoid that situation again.  This has profound evolutionary consequences, because it will help prevent us from an early death, or other misfortune.  Unfortunately, the success of this information processing shortcut, can cause other dilemmas.

Optical Illusions are a good example of how this method can fail.  Optical illusions are a result of “visual processing optimizations” that work perfectly in most situations, but in these unique cases, the mind cannot resolve the data.  The optical illusion highlights a “visual processing shortcut” that failed to work properly in a highly specialized situation.

With Information Processing in the mind, it seems that a similar phenomenon is at work.  Negative information is given an inordinate amount of importance.  If we have one bad experience, we tend to avoid the situation where the bad experience occurred.  In relationships, for example, if we have nine neutral interactions and one negative interaction, the relationship will tend to be influenced most strongly by the negative memory.  The result of this is that: over time we just remember the bad things about people and tend to forget the good qualities or memories.  THIS is one reason why office politics are so bitter and neighborhood rivalries are so poisonous.

Over time we grow to hate the people that we are in constant contact with.  We lose our childhood friendships, our family experience becomes bitter, we hate our coworkers and we despise our neighbors.  This is a universal human experience that is a result of the ordinary workings of our memory optimization.  This is a natural process of the ordinary working of the normal human mind.

There is nothing that we can do about this it seems.  This is the way a normal healthy brain operates.

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However, we can “game the system”  Knowing that the brain tends to forget positive experience and give precedence to negative experiences, we can consciously program positive information into our memory to give ourselves a more accurate vision of our real experience.  We do this by “being thankful.”

The process of consciously recalling positive experiences and positive valuations can help ameliorate the negative consequences of our ordinary mental processing.  By consciously noting and reminding ourselves that these situations, people, relationships, and environments have positive and “good” qualities, gives us a memory that is more balanced with “reality.”   Over time, these thankful thoughts, and realizations, help counteract the natural human tendency to give inordinate precedence to negative information and slowly forget positive qualities.

This universal human cultural tradition of being thankful and remembering to be “thankful for our blessings”  helps refresh our memory and preserves in our mind some of the other equally important qualities of life.

This is one reason why we have “Thanksgiving Festivals”, celebrations, days of remembering, and other established cultural traditions.   These are way of preserving and enhancing positive memories and positive evaluations of the people, environments and situations in our lives.  We need to be thankful, just to stay balanced, and happy.

Copyright©2015

William Schaeffer