News by thunder

"I am William, the butler." He would introduce himself as such, in a slow, steady voice, and in a dignified a-la The Remains of the Day posture. He was the main character in an unusual college located in the south of England that I attended years back that offered a strange mix of courses in Ecology, Music and the Humanities. It was ordinary fare for one enrolled in ecology to be walking the snow-covered grounds looking for meager life and bump into chamber musicians crossing the castle’s courtyard in velvety gowns. But let us go back to William. He was my favorite because you could always count on him to make the most important announcements in the morning, ranging from our assigned chores to the daily menu which depended on the available vegetables, to the weather (very important to know in Britain) which even included a good candidate path for a snowy walk for the day, to "lost and found" features such as that of a lonely 34-C Marks and Spencer brassiere that had been left unclaimed in the laundry room. He would always do it methodically, in a neutral voice, in such order of importance that we all really tuned in to William’s broadcast in the morning in the main hall. In a place with no TV and served only vegetarian food, he was our only Peter Jennings. Eight years have passed since then and I still remember his broadcasts in faithful order. His broadcasts reinforced a life I loved devoted to keen observation and Nature/science writing. It has led me to adventures in getting to intimately know vegetables I never knew existed and in the walks he suggested, discover life that persists in the harshest of winters. His weather announcements also saved me from taking dangerous walks in the woods that I often did when my stomach feels like it was time for its all-vegetable symphony to have a chicken interlude.

But why is it that I do not remember last night’s local primetime news? Surely, the saga of warfare, political mayhem and economic crisis here and everywhere else would have captured my attention. I always try to watch the news in the major local networks. "Try" because I always find myself unable to survive any of them intelligently. First, the anchors always open like the gods of thunder, with booming voices as if it were their last broadcast because a meteor as big as Jupiter is approaching our planet and delivering the news in supreme decibel levels is the only remaining chance of repelling the meteor. Second, they never stay with a topic until they have exhausted everything they have to say about it; they shift from the news of a massacre of innocent lives in Zamboanga to some budding love affair with teeny boppers who are trying to be the latest showbiz flavors, to some incestuous police report in the same time it takes for a viewer to say "huh?" Third, this shifting of topics goes on till the end in some syncopated manner, disjointed, and each piece of news is delivered in the same imposing voices, regardless of theme or importance.

Apparently, the same thing has been bothering cognitive scientist Dr. Emy Concepcion Liwag, chairwoman of the Psychology Department of the Ateneo de Manila University. Recently, we got to discuss this and we both got to ask ourselves, "Is this deliberate on the part of the news teams?" Cognitive science helps us understand how our mind helps us make sense of all the information we get from everywhere around us. She says the way the major local news is delivered really shortchanges our capacity to focus on any item in the news. 

Dr. Liwag said, "We have a sensory register in our brain, sort of a window that opens and shuts within one to two seconds and from these ‘windows,’ we decide on what to store in our short-term and long-term memories. The problem with the way our local news is delivered is that they open and close all these windows one after the other, that we are left with no time to think for ourselves and decide what is important." That instantly made sense to me because that is really how it feels like watching the local news, just windows and no doors to deliberately open and explore in a more focused manner. The brain loves a new thing all the time and the current news formats capitalize on this to keep our attention, but keeping it in this mode all the time prevents us from honing a more seasoned way of thinking about things. We are glued to the format without understanding anything. The mere fact that they cut up the top and presumably the most important headline into bits and pieces strewn all over the duration of the broadcast, gives the brain a really hard time to figure out the pattern or logic of the news of the day. And the brain is the ultimate pattern-seeker. It is why we see images of what is familiar to us, which explains the phenomenon of why people see religious figures or any other object, in toasted bread, rocks, or clouds. No pattern, no sense.

Dr. Liwag added that we also look to body language to cue us in on the meaning or importance of what we are hearing. The sensationalized and panicky voices of the news bringers remain the same regardless of whether they are talking about the fate of the nation or the fate of the latest fashion or latest heartache of some showbiz personality. When our ears’ hairs get into some commotion, it means "sound" is visiting, and when the thundering news anchors’ announcement of the break-up of some celebrity couple causes our ears’ hairs the same quivering as when I hear the growl of rabid dogs coming toward us, there is something wrong with the way we assign "sound" as a cue to what is important to us. Our brains are puzzled as to what to remember and what is important because it cannot remember everything. It is "cognitively uneconomical" to remember everything because it will drive us crazy. Focus behooves us to only pick what is important to us. And focusing on what is important is what makes us intelligent viewers. Naturalist and excellent science writer Diane Ackerman in her book An Alchemy of Mind said it memorably: "What we pay attention to helps define us. With what does a man choose to spend the irreplaceable hours of his life?" Surely, we do not want to squander our irreplaceable hours in close attention to the inconsequential just because they are noisy.

We Filipinos have always accused each other of having a poor memory, that we do not remember where we faltered in history and why and so we repeat the same tragic episodes. Knowing what we know now in the sciences about how the mind makes sense of information, we know now that the way the news is delivered is every bit as important as its content. While the media says it does not make the news, the way it organizes and gives it to us, makes up a big part of how we will treat the news in importance – whether we will let them fall by the gutters of our attention or install them in the more permanent halls of memory which will guide our future actions. The human eye is a complex organ with a hundred million photoreceptors working to absorb lighted information such as that from our TV sets. And so are our ears with hundreds of hairs to signal sound coming on. The media should always remember that what it ultimately services is not just the eyes and the ears of their viewers, but what sits behind it – the minds of its viewers – organizing the images and sound bytes from the news into a coherent memory useful for the rest of its days. Allow us, the viewers, the pace to think for ourselves in sorting through the news you deliver without being shoved and numbed by your looming voices.

William, the butler, constructed a giant wind chime as a memorial to our class. It hanged in one of the very old trees in the campus’ beautiful grounds. On our last day, before we all left the course, he assembled all of us under the old tree and struck the chime. It echoed in a steady, balanced sound in all directions, bookmarking for each of us the summary meaning of the experience of being there. He never said a word but it was the single most important broadcast he made before all of us.

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