The Pleasure Of Not Finding Things Out

All of you would agree with me that we find it absorbing and rivetting to solve puzzles,be it crossword or world problems. We say that we find them 'stimulating' and it gives us a great amount of satisfaction, a sense of achievement , when after battling for a long time with pen and paper, we come up with anwers or solutions.

What is about these puzzles and questions that we find so interesting? Why do they stimulate us, at all? Don't you think that evolution has favoured our capacity and ability to find pleasure, a 'pleasure sensation' in finding things out? It infact has, that is for sure.

Buts it is not quite this pleasure that I wish to draw your attention to, but rather the exact opposite of it - The pleasure of not finding things out.

Haven't we all came across questions or puzzles that could never be solved?
How did we react to it- Once we learnt that it can't simply be solved by us (or anybody, for that matter) , we pass it on to others.

I dont just believe that we have all evolved to better solve puzzles, but also have evolved in a way that we tend to keep unsolved ones alive - alive in our memory and alive in our culture. Which means our brains have evolved not just to to give emotional/harmonal rewards on solving puzzling questions but also to retain them in memory and passing it on to others. Evolution might have favoured this tendency because it found that having answers to such questions, helped us survive better. Such animals were better equipped to survive because every puzzle of nature that they solved , increased their knowledge base. Everytime man faced with a new piece of information, he tried to resolve the contradictions within the sum total of the information that we had before stumbling across the new piece. With a larger knowledge base he could organize more information and further expand his knowledge.

So an animal aware of an unsolved puzzle had a better future that the animal which is not aware of the puzzle at all.

Soon the amount of information and knowledge that made up this culture of survival became so large that the investment of energy and risk needed to cross this knowledge barrier to a higher level, beacame unaffordable. The brain's ability fell into a strange predicament- a trouble hitherto unknown- complacency and stagnation.

Many of the questions that we had then, we call- the Eternal Questions. Questions like- how are the seasons created, where does the sun go after it sets, does nature have a controller, where do we come from, Is there a God, Who am I, Why am I, so on and so forth- are questions / puzzled raised as we move from one Knowledge strata to another. It is this state of human mind, this state of culture that gave rise to religion- dogmas and superstitions, blind faith and blind beliefs.

Only an extraordinary mind, a brave sceptic could break out of the shakles of religion and take the human mind to the next level. It is this mind that we salute and show our gratitude to- and many such minds that would follow- Socrates, Aristotle, Leonardo da Vinci,Galileo, Isaac Newton, Fraraday, Darwin.... the real heroes.

So whenever we realize that we, consciously or sub consciously, are finding some pleasure in knowing and remembering the unknown and unsolved, we must immediately shake ourselves out of the dream- of complacency and stagnation- to struggle our way towards the solution- to the next level- to a level where in lies the future- a hope for better life- and ofcourse- A Pleasure unsurpassable by any other.