I continue to read “The Organized Mind” and come across an interesting passage about how age affects how we react to negative and positive information.

Older adults show a special preference for emotionally positive memories over emotionally negative memories, while younger adults show the opposite. This makes sense because it has long been known that younger people find negative information more compelling and more memorable than the positive. Cognitive scientists have suggested that we tend to learn more from negative information then from positive – one obvious case is that positive information often simply confirms what we already know, where is negative information reveals to us areas of ignorance. In this sense, the drive for negative information in youth parallels the thirst for knowledge that wanes as we age.

My first thought about this is related to music. It’s certainly true that youth prefer what we might call “negative” forms of music. Music styles like goth, heavy metal, punk and whatnot certainly advocate against the mainstream ethos of society. And interest in these music styles tends to wane with age. You don’t see a lot of 75-year-old punk rockers out there.

There’s also the stereotype of the wholesome kid who goes off to college, takes a couple of Noam Chomsky courses, and suddenly hates America. This is, of course, an oversimplification of what goes on there, but in essence, the kid is embracing a point of view that goes against the mainstream.

The point of all this being that this pursuit of negativity may be in some sense “wired” into our genes and brains. Younger minds are more receptive to negative ideas, and older minds more resistant to them. (Certainly, we think of older people as being more “traditional” than younger people e.g. they are more prone to celebrate mainstream beliefs and symbols.)