Perhaps not Mozart, but anything is better than a fucking jingle.
I havent seen a TV commercial in years.
We live in a world where we are constantly bombarded by information. Some of it stick to your brain whether you like it or not. Presumably the brain has a finite amount of bandwidth for processing/retaining incoming information. With that in mind, I'll do my best to avoid commercials so something from the 'useful' information streams has a better chance of sticking.
Or perhaps my brain will latch on to some other useless information. But thats ok, because adverts are the fucking bottom-feeders of the information ocean.
Commercials didnt use to annoy me that much. But for the last three years I've consumed all my TV via Netflix and online video, commercial free. Now I find commercials unbearable. Sometimes I even get angry - how dare they interrupt my immersion and enjoyment of a story? Imagine if you were reading a book and every 5 minutes some obnoxious advert interrupted you? Thats how weird it feels.
I wish there were no ads in the middle of a programme. I hate it. We live in a world of "director's cuts", so I'm surprised we still get weird stupid ads throughout a movie.
Thats a nice perspective, I might try that. The science of advertising is also interesting - these marketers spent squillions of research dollars on figuring out the most effective technique to transfer an idea/emotion/brand (essentially a meme) to your brain. Those techniques are also applicable to giving a presentation for work and public speaking. I've noticed the most successful people in the workplace are those who can 'sell' their ideas to their colleagues and managers.
But are TV adverts really more "mentally polluting" than a 80s song or a limerick you picked up at a schoolyard?
For the most case I think you're right. There is a subset of more evil adverts which attempt to play on insecurities (body image, gender roles/responsibilities, medical fearmonging). But most advertising is just...transient noise. Never attribute to malice what can be explained by banality.
I have a pet theory that our brains will retain a certain amount of useless 'mental pollution' regardless of what information streams are being thrown at it. Not because we need those little nuggets of useless information, but because they are implicit to the formation and recall of other 'useful' memories and emotions. Memory is a multi-sensory thing, regardless of what part of the memory is 'useful'.
Music is a special case, its ability to trigger episodic memories is very strong[1]. I like to think of it in computer science terms as a hash table[2]. If you spend enough time doing a certain thing whilst listening to the same music, the event is stored against the hash (music). Then in the future, listening to this music will trigger a very strong memory of that time in your life.
I spent many hours as a teenager listening to music whilst playing video games. Now if I listen to these albums, the memories instantly 'come flooding back' as the saying goes.
[1]I believe olfactory triggers are stronger than auditory triggers. Perhaps smell-o-vision advertising is the next big thing.
[2] Not a great analogy - the linking and recall is really bidirectional.
This is the question. We intake so much that has been produced by others (mostly for commercial purposes) that it's plausible that one doesn't know what would be going through their head, were it not for commercials, movies, tv shows, advertising and the like.
One of the reasons I stopped watching (the stand-up comedy section at the start of) late-night talk shows is because laughing meant I was inside the bubble and, in my view, part of the problem.
Also interesting to think about is if we take out the need for money (ie, in Star Trek or back when we traded things) it makes me wonder what we would be spending our time with, mentally and otherwise.
