Home Good Ideas Teacher Shows Students How Negative Words Can Make Rice Moldy
Teacher Shows Students How Negative Words Can Make Rice Moldy
by Joao Freitas - Jun 11, 2017
The impact of positive and negative emotions might be more impactful than you think—and more persuasive.
A teacher in Curitiba, a southern region in Brazil, decided to illustrate the power of words to her students by using two cups of sealed rice.
Physical education teacher Ana Paula Frezatto Martins arranged the class in a circle around the two cups of grains. Then, she asked the students to say bad things to one of the cups — things people might hear in everyday life, like “you are useless”, “you are stupid”, and “you can’t accomplish anything”.
To the second glass, the teacher asked the kids to say things they would like to hear from everyone. The kids used such expressions as “you are special”, “you can accomplish anything”, and “you are smart”. Days later, the rice in the “love cup” fermented naturally while the rice in the “hate cup” became dark and moldy.
Martins says she has always tried to show her students the importance of highlighting positivity.
“In my classes I explain the importance of saying nice things to each other, but kids need more tangible physical expressions of our examples,” says Martins, according to Globo.
“When you say something nice, like ‘you can do it’, you feel that in your heart,” says 10-year-old student Anita Santini Trevisan. The youngster says that because of the experiment, she has tried to be more positive every day.
Another student, Henrique Kloster, had a similar conclusion: “The damage of negativity is bigger than we can imagine … there are two ways to say things, the right way is to praise the good side of others with the eyes of the heart, not the eyes we see.”
The rice experiment mirrors a famous one conducted by Masaro Emoto who tested distilled water and natural water when it was frozen into crystals to see what would happen when they were exposed to different human emotional energy, in the form of words, pictures, thoughts and music — for instance, heavy metal music versus classical. He then observed the crystals under a microscope.
“In all of these experiments,” he wrote on his website, “the result was that we always observed beautiful crystals after giving good words, playing good music, and showing, playing, or offering prayer to water. On the other hand, we observed disfigured crystals in the opposite situation.”
He published these results as a photographic collection, entitled “Messages from Water (1999)”. The photos have been viewed by millions, and used in films, like the one below.
He also did a similar experiment on jars of cooked rice. As you can see in the video below, the rice stayed productive and pure when it was appreciated, but the rice that was either hated or ignored, turned black and moldy.
The rice experiment has been undertaken by others who recorded on video the same results, and shared them on YouTube.
It makes us want to pay more attention to the words and emotions we are displaying toward others every day.