Sometimes,I do look at TEDx and all such “inspiring” and “motivational” talks. I don’t mean sarcasm with the quotes, but there is an angle to them that normally people don’t look at. How I stumbled on the angle is a small anecdote for later.
What does a motivational speaker from some inspiring talk do?
I mean actually what do they do in physical terms? Just Blah blah and Blah! You might say people feel motivated and inspired from the talks, I agree. But what is it about the talk that makes you feel motivated? How can a few, well not a few but several words/sentences when spoken in some way (unique to the speaker) comes to instill positive feelings in you. It is almost as if you were depleted and somehow you feel repleted or topped up with whatever it may be. Your batteries feel recharged. How? What happens in the process and how it happens?
I have a theory for this based on computer programming. I hope it doesnt bore you.
A human being is an advanced form a of a programmable program. It has its a lot of states and biases about a lot of things. These biases determine the response(reaction) to any input (stimulus) . At any point of time the combination of different bias values reflect into our state of feelings and emotions as we know. These emotions then directs the reaction to any stimuli and so on. The biases that we talked about are neither fixed nor floating. For sometimes some inputs may happen which change some bias altogether. For ex. someone who has faced a serious trauma has a bias or feeling against it which was not there before. Yet some are born with such fears which go away after they are put through some specific situations. These biases are nothing but the level of certain chemicals in our brain, controlled by hormones I guess. Depletion of some of these chemicals can be felt as feeling dejected and feeling demotivated. Now a motivational speaker knows how these can be programmed back into refilling the chemicals and they do that so well that you don’t know but
they hacked your freaking brain!
How cool is that!!!
Please let me know your thoughts and feelings on these! Rather your state of chemicals in your brain so that I may refill my dopamine seeing your comments 🙂
Santu Online! 