I'd say he was pretty damn close.
I wrote the above and then did some googling. Found this article: https://www.fastcompany.com/3060491/what-happened-to-my-brai.... I don't know how reputable it is, but here's a quote relevant to this discussion:
"There have been EEG studies that demonstrate that television watching converts the brain from beta wave activity to alpha waves, which are associated with a daydreaming state, and a reduced use of critical thinking skills."
Kids believe in the tooth faerie, but can reconcile this belief later because it never showed up on a test. Now I’m going to piss off everybody. Try to reconcile your beliefs with observable facts about King Leonidas or Helen Keller. Or if you went to a fundamentalist school, try any religious figure. Those are minor beliefs that have little consequence for society. There are major ones too.
At some point, you should realize that you live in a fictional belief system. And I mean you, not just people who you think have been brainwashed. If you’re really truly brilliant and skeptical, you may reconcile 0.1% of these beliefs, but even then subject to “Murray Gell-Man” amnesia for 99.9% of your beliefs. The only people who can possibly escape this are those who are labeled as imbeciles for their inability to convert between memory of fact and assumption of belief.
For instance, there are ‘idiot savants’ that can memorize an entire book just for fun, but will never assume that anything written in any book is actually true. These people are completely unable to assimilate culturally, and we institutionalize them for that reason.
A a side note, just as soma (and nearly all popular drugs) create suggestibility, I think it should be possible to reverse this and become more like an idiot savant. An example might be an antagonist of dopamine, serotonin, or opiate receptors, but I’m not sure. If anybody has any other ideas or experience with currently-available compounds, I would like to hear them.
