Mental pollution is bewilderment and perplexity in the thinking process which ultimately leads to stress, anxiety, and tension in our lives. It is the amalgam of preoccupied imaginary negative thoughts, apprehensions, and speculations that psychologically haunt our minds. With the advancement of science and information technology in our lives, we have oceanic information available to us. This information contains the main mental pollutants, in the form of sexual, horrible, or violent video clips that contaminate our mind, adversely affect our decision making and learning process and weaken our memory. Mental pollution can also be caused by some criticism, disfavor, dishonor, or an unpleasant situation or relationship. Pride and inferiority complex is also a kind of mental pollution. All those people who give preference to their personal gains without caring for others are involved in a kind of mental pollution. As our body requires a clean, nutritious, and balanced diet to remain healthy, similarly healthy content is required for a healthy mind. Anxiety, depression, jealousy, illogical and negative thoughts, immoral actions, and fear of the future are some of the adverse effects caused by mental pollution. Mental pollution is also harmful to society as it leads to all sorts of evils in a society like robberies, rapes, murders, and other crimes. Modern man is living in a lustrous imaginary world because of the easy availability of technology where he imagines that everything is under his control. He has forgotten that God has created different people with different abilities. This forgetfulness has resulted in jealousy, competition, avariciousness, and egoism which in turn has resulted in mental pollution.
It has been observed in a study that out of almost 6700 languages spoken in the world more than 2000 languages are spoken in the continent of Africa where the educational standard is very low. Furthermore, as per the reports of the Centre for Advanced Study of African Languages, almost 75-80% of Africans are multilingual and can speak 12-15 languages as either their first or second language. Since Africa is the world’s least developed continent where people are living in very poor and impecunious conditions with little availability of scientific and industrial resources, they have limited access to multimedia videos, books, dictionaries, and internet services. On the other hand, people in developed and civilized regions of the world can hardly learn a single foreign language in their lifetime though they have access to all these aids and helping tools. According to experts, the absence of mental pollutants in the environment enables an African to learn and speak an average of 13 languages. Researchers believe that besides socio-cultural and psychological factors, the absence of mental pollutants in the form of violent and sexual images and videos coming from various media sources can play a vital role in learning foreign languages. Intentional or unintentional encounters with various mental pollutants in the form of movies, programs, pictures, posters, advertisements can trigger brain hormones and disturb the biochemical system of our body, which results in the arousal of various emotions like anger, frustration, fear, or sexual thrill. Such emotions weaken our memory power, imbalance our thoughts and make our mind unable to concentrate and focus on new things and hinder our learning and other cognitive processes. Researchers are of the opinion that during the ancient periods despite the unavailability of science and information technology and powerful tools, people had sharp memory power and they were masters in many fields and languages due to the absence of mental pollutants in the atmosphere, which could weaken their learning process and other mental abilities. It was observed during a survey conducted by some experts in the Faith University of Turkey, that people who spend most of their time in front of TV or computer screens because of their work, entertainment or some other purposes are involved in some kind of mental pollution irrespective of their age, sex or occupation. According to this survey, the level of mental pollution of an individual depends upon the amount of time he or she spends indulging in different media forms of media.
It was observed during a survey conducted by some experts in the Faith University of Turkey, that people who spend most of their time in front of TV or computer screens because of their work, entertainment or some other purposes are involved in some kind of mental pollution irrespective of their age, sex or occupation.
It is pertinent to mention here that media and communication is not the only source of mental pollution but any process, event, or episode which confuses our mind, diverts our attention, or disturbs our concentration can decrease our mental abilities and result in mental pollution. As positive comments and applause from people can give a person happiness, similarly their inexpedient criticism or negative behavior can clog our mental capabilities. Hence, we should always avoid people who have negativity in their ideologies so that our minds could remain free from any kind of pollution. It is the need of the hour to create awareness about the ill effects of misuse of modern technology. The sole purpose of technology is to make our life easy and comfortable; it should not take away the peace of our mind by polluting it. It will be time-consuming and difficult for us to learn new things and processes if we will fail in controlling the different factors which result in mental pollution. Overuse and misuse of media and information technology will result in wastage of time instead and can deterioration of our mental health. We should take every possible step to curb mental pollution and keep our minds clean and healthy because nothing can harm an individual as much as an unhealthy mind.
Though our use of technology and social media platforms are unavoidable but the phenomenon of mental contemplation can be controlled by right knowledge and positive approach. The postmodern humans have to live in the digital world with all negative encounters and ontological anxieties. It is like living with a physically crippled body that cannot be escaped. But it can be controlled and confronted with courage, optimism and self-control. This approach can prevent us from apathy, perplexity and pre-deterministic factors that affects thought process.