Do You Often Find Yourself Lost for Words?
In the face of the surprising novelty, in the face of the scale of the disaster, for a moment? You forget. Of course, we forget the language, not so much "in the mouth" as in the head. Maybe it's good, but in these short moments let's not listen to good advice, let's look where we want to look, higher, deeper, sharper, through tears, involuntarily. Let's see ours. Maybe it will do something?
According to many researchers of neural processes, the centres and cortical pathways responsible for responding to completely new situations unknown to the body are more developed in the right hemisphere of the brain, are more active during periods of rapid growth and also age faster (C. Chiron, I. Jambaque, R. Nabbout, R. Lounes, A. Sirota, O. Dulac, The right brain hemisphere is dominant in human infants., Brain, vol. 120, Issue 6, Jun 1997, p. 1057–1065, https://doi.org/10.1093/brain/120.6.1057).
A new cognitive challenge is also every disaster, acute crisis.
What advice then appears in the social space? The first, the most obvious is: don't look there! Don't come near, don't be interested, go ahead, close your eyes! This is not bad advice. It is used by almost all art galleries. Don't look there – look here. Here are the images. They hang and show what and how. They are supposed to protect against exposure to drasticity, allow you to maintain the reaction routine, save the body's energy, reduce the number of disturbing onlookers.
That's not good advice either. It makes us instantly indifferent, more zealously repeat sequences of actions that have just turned out to be insufficient.
The so-called return to normality may be a return to paradise, but not at the price of turning a blind eye to the command.
The correlation between the location in the right hemisphere of centres activating in the face of the new situation, as well as the centres of the so-called non-verbal learning, is interesting. Byron P. Rourke (Nonverbal Learning Disabilities: the Syndrome and the Model, 1989) showed that the impairment of such learning is more often caused by damage to the right hemisphere. We still don't know what these centres have in common, but it can be assumed that the limitation of the ability to learn – not through language (e.g. command, command, clearly formulated prohibition and order, IT: command line), – tendency to routine behaviour, mental rigidity, to what is surprising overlap at the level of neural activity.
This may be the neurological source of many social phenomena that take place after each disaster. Pressure for its rapid memoryization, anniversary ritualization, change into a stimulus completely controlled, for example by power.
It is indisputable that every type of novelty activates centres specializing in processing not language, but images. Yes, yes. Picture. When there is a narrative describing, "presenting" what has just happened, the common feature of each language and every form of power known to us returns: the hierarchical structure. Everything new has already found its expression, it has been fit into grammar, recursion, into calming subordination. This means that the left hemisphere with a larger Planum temporale In the temporal lobe dealing with speech recognition, it took over a dominant role. Everything has returned to "normal", we can remember. View hundreds of photos on your phone.
Graphics: Kahramanmaraş, beginning of February 2023; film poster by Agata Samulska; familiar face on another poster for the same "black comedy".