As much as we like to think of ourselves as reflective and thoughtful creatures, the hard truth is that our brains are highly reactive. They are, perhaps literally, hard-wired to respond to stimuli from our senses.

It may even be true that much of this reaction occurs outside of our conscious perception of it: visual cues give us thought, sounds that make us spin our head to look, slight variations in the terrain below our feet as we walk shift our gaits, scents wafting in the air trigger memories—or any of a hundred thousand million combinations of things we see, hear, taste, smell, or feel cause a reaction outside of our awareness of it.

Each of these cause a cascade of neural energy through our nervous system and into some part of our brain that has been evolutionarily adapted for self preservation and to react in a way that will keep us alert and alive. 

We probably don’t think about it enough, but I’m almost certain that the same reactivity holds true for the words and images that we watch and read. These things enter our brains and as much as we are able to logically think about them and be rational, thoughtful human computation engines about big ideas and moral philosophies, and social insights, it is also likely that these same stimuli pass through our unconscious selves and drive reactivity that we can neither sense nor control. 

They say you are what you eat, and you probably only feel as good as the media you consume, too.