RE: You can be an atheist and still follow the ten commandments as guidelines
January 20, 2017 at 11:43 pm
Okay, I've done a little bit of research on the brain's processing of positives versus negatives, and have this to report:
- First of all, it's not as simple as it appears. Most instances I found of the "brain cannot process negatives" trope were on sites devoted to pop psychology rather than peer-reviewed journals.
- Secondly, the actual structure of the statement determines how the brain processes it. Link: True or False? How Our Brain Processes Negative Statements (Association for Psychological Science). The presence of a negative word does not automatically cause the brain to struggle with it, but the more syntactically complex a sentence is, the longer the reaction time.
- What I found particularly interesting is that the brain processes affirmative and negative statements in different regions. Link: Negative and affirmative sentences increase activation in different areas in the brain (Journal of Neurolinguistics - abstract only)