Reward... [and punishment]

While I was in grad school, just to piss off my committee, an possibly to learn more about the world, I took a graduate level English class (I'm a chemist... lets just say they didn't like the idea, and wanted to make me take an engineering course to make up for it, but I digress).  I learnt a lot from this class, about the writing process, about logical flow, about the balancing of ideas and such. But, there are two things that i consider the take home lessons for grad-school as a whole:  that we should always take time to walk in the shoes of the other, and that life is made of weird juxtapositions, word, or phrases that go together.  Examples of these are black and white, gold and silver, and reward and punishment.

Rewards are cool.  Rewards are in the purest form, a token of gratitude for doing a task correctly. Note here I said doing, and not completing. The tokens also come in many flavors.  From words to actions to tangible objects, tokens of gratitude are meant to offer praise to one for being considerate, selfless, sharing, kind, and other things like these.  Not surprisingly, our brains have become used to gaining rewards, up to the point where rewards affect our brain chemistry.  Rewards make us happy.

Of course, there is the opposite of reward- punishment. Punishment is bad. Like a reward a punishment in its purest form is a token of disapproval for not completing a task, or for doing something in a way that is not expected or approved by the other. Punishments taste sour, make us sad, mess up our brain chemistry to the point that we feel sorry for ourselves.  Punishments shame us.  Most people despise punishment.

Because these paired words have so much effect on people, the concept of reward /punishment has been exploited for centuries with the main purpose for controlling people.  Religion offers the token of a heaven for people who follow their "moral" ways, credit card companies offer us points to save on more crap that we already have or do not need.  And governments have prisons for those people who royally eff-up.

I just lost my trend of taught.

Anyways, my point is, rewards are cool.  Punishments suck.  People use these to mess with our heads, to the point where we try to reward/punish our selves to mess with our own heads.  Crazy!

Now I need a reward, hmm what will it be?