Nastiness makes a bigger impact on our
brain than good news.

And that is due to the brain's
"negativity bias". Your brain is simply built with a
greater sensitivity to unpleasant news. The bias is so automatic that
it can be detected at the earliest stage of the brain's information
processing. - Ohio State University psychologist John T. Cacioppo,
Ph.D.

Our attitudes are more heavily
influenced by downbeat news than good news, Cacioppo says.

However, if we read or see more bad
things do we accept it and become insensitive to it?

Yes. In response to terrorist attacks,
daily reports of assassinations and multitudes of castaways drifting
in solitude, we hardly feel anything. We live in an era in which we
are becoming insensitive to bad news especially ones involving human
tragedies.

It seems to be the norm now to even
feel more powerful when others suffer.

Joan and I went to the cinema last
Saturday but the movie we went to see was sold out. We ended up
watching the next one showing and the title didn't tell us anything
- “Ready or Not”. When I asked the counter assistant he looked up
the genre and told me it was a comedy.

Forty-five minutes later we sat down to
enjoy a good laugh.

Once, and only once we did laugh. In
fact the whole audience laughed. There were a few titters. The
advertised synopsis of the movie is. “READY OR NOT follows a young
bride as she joins her new husband's rich, eccentric family in a
time-honored tradition that turns into a lethal game with everyone
fighting for their survival.

Doesn't sound very amusing and I expect
most of you are asking what has this to do with the above content I
have been writing about in this Editorial?

The assistant didn't read all of the
genre, either by design or he missed it. The missing word was HORROR.

A comedy horror move? Oh yes.

There was more bloody, horrific, scenes
in the 1 hour 35 minutes of running time I have ever seen, and I grew
up in the Hammer Horror movies when I was much younger.

So much of it in fact I, along with
most of the audience go so used to it that when a young lady opened a
door and said, “Hi”, an arrow from a crossbow shot into her eye
and appeared through the back of her head with blood spurting
everywhere, we all roared with laughter.

The heroine (the bride)was the only
person left alive at the end of the movie, bullet wounds seeping with
blood from her body, fingers hanging off her hands, and sitting on
the house door step waiting patiently for the police to arrive.

Apart from the first of the killings the shocking scenes, that did get more bloody, didn't shock us anymore. Our brain got so impacted with the all the gore it became the norm.