If you are in a sorrowful mood, it will be difficult to enjoy a fast-paced joyful song. Many times, you may want to listen to an old Mukhesh song and stay in the same mood for some time. This can happen other way round also. It is difficult to listen to a melancholic melody when you are in a joyful upbeat mood.
I call this Emotional Inertia
My example above is an obvious case where such a contrast is clearly visible. However, I envisage that emotional inertia exists even in subtler ways. It doesn't allow us to switch between topics easily.
I claim that emotional inertia is responsible for slow pace of learning in many children. Especially science and math topics need quicker switch between multiple topics purely based on logical connections of topics which are not necessarily aligned to our emotional connection with topics.
Especially in exams, this effect accentuates. It results in an emotional switch mayhem for students in exams where they have to switch from question to question at breakneck speeds.
This is my hypothesis. Is there a way to test this hypothesis?
After thought:
I think what I wrote above is slightly vague because it explores a new idea without first stating some assumptions. Here are some background information regarding my thought process.
Emotion as we understand it is a certain well-defined state of our mind maintained for some
duration by a combination of certain hormones and neurotransmitters.
However, these states are reached after these liquids (hormones and neurotransmitters) cross a
certain threshold.
I am interested in more subtler changes in these liquids. As Dr. V. S. Ramachandran puts it; when we see something (or hear), it reaches the brain in two pathways. One is a quick short circuit way, the other is a slightly slow processed information pathway. The shortcut path, he calls it as reptilian pathway is shaped by survival needs. Fight or flight responses are generated even before something is fully processed and understood. Once the second path signal reaches the prefrontal cortex after processing, a thing is understood and hence it overrides the effect of short circuit path.
However, this short circuit path is coupled to neurotransmitters and hormones, and they already
generate them. It takes some time to dilute that effect.
This is a subtler aspect of emotion that plays role in learning (my hypothesis).
Human beings cannot learn anything without both wet (reptilian) and dry (human) pathways. In fact, wet pathway is the one that determines the weightage and prioritizes our learning.
I was trying to imagine the effect of this kind of subtler emotional responses to the type of things we learn. Where they are conducive and when they are slightly detrimental to the pace of learning. There is no final understanding yet. Just exploring.
Secondly, I believe pattern of examination is completely unaligned to emotional inertia and forces quick switching. The impact of this can be bad on children in a long run. This is another thought.
Comments