They knew it all along.

This 1940 Chevy infomercial focused on facts of human nature as described by Professor Laird (who certainly looked like a prof!)

Anxiety and tension come from three main causes: Noise or anticipating noise; fear of losing control; and a sense of being confined or trapped. All are natural and necessary.

Prof Laird also gave the correct instructions for handling tension through systematic relaxation and uncramping. He did NOT give the universal postwar advice to take expensive pills and expensive shrink sessions.

Of course the Chevy film brought Chevy advantages into the picture. 1940 Chevies were well insulated, quiet, easy to control, and (thanks to the new column shift) wide and relaxing to sit in. Contrived connections, but still a helpful way to think about resolving the causes.

I know the facts now, but the facts were not available anywhere when I was young. My dad taught psychology and had psych books in his bookshelf. We discussed the subject often at home. School also taught various parts of the subject. Much later I took a psych class in college, and had a few sessions with a therapist in the 1980s.

I never heard any of these facts until just a few years ago. Not at home, not from classes, not from the therapist. The therapist advised me to handle tension by playing tennis!! A competitive team sport was EXACTLY the wrong advice. I didn’t need ONE MORE way to feel like a defeated loser.

Until a few years ago, these natural reactions were uniformly called phobias or abnormalities, not simply part of human nature. Knowing that these responses are natural and necessary would have helped a naturally anxious type, would have prevented the added panic loop of worrying ABOUT the responses.

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Related: Another Chevy production, a dealer training film from 1958, was equally candid and correct about other facts of human behavior, and again we were NOT hearing these facts from school or books or TV.

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Just for fun I checked Laird. He was definitely an authority on noise, writing popular articles for many years based on real physiological experiments. See p 116 of this PDF for a 1929 article. He recognized that the brain is reshaped by constant anxiety.

= = = = = START LAIRD:

The fear reaction results in tightened muscles, altered blood pressure and rate, breathing changes, increased adrenalin thrown into the bloodstream, and digestive paralysis. When these changes are constantly being produced in the body by vicious noises they can easily result in a strained, tense, irritable personality.

Since the vast majority of people in the United States are being subjected to increasing noises, due partly to a greater use of machinery and partly to newer methods of building construction, I am entertaining the theory, unproved as yet, that noise is changing the American personality profoundly.

= = = = = END LAIRD.

His theory has been proved by long experience, and more recently by EEG/MRI examining of brain networks.