Word: braine
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...brain loathes uncertainty. In laboratory experiments, humans actually fear uncertainty more than physical pain. We are simply wired this way. When we encounter uncertainty, the first thing we do is try to beat it back. The problem is, uncertainty may not be the biggest threat. It may be a distraction - the kind we have to cope with while we do the actual work of keeping ourselves alive...
...Manage Risk Over the past 50 years, researchers who study human judgment have realized that we rely on emotions to make decisions about risk. We can't possibly mull over every new piece of data our brains collect, so our emotions give us shortcuts, helping us make split-second judgments about that information. The more uncertainty, the more shortcuts we use. This is a good thing. People who have suffered brain damage that removes emotions from their calculations cannot function. They can't make decisions, even simple ones. So we need our emotions to make sense of the world...
...brain's shortcuts come with certain predictable biases. In experiments, people reliably overestimate the chances of something happening if they can vividly imagine it. If we see something new, we try to fit it into a box that we understand - for example, a box labeled "Mild: The Same as Regular Influenza." Or maybe, more cinematically, "Plague Invading the Heartland," or perhaps another one called "Media Hype." All those boxes contain parts of the story. None is quite right. (See pictures of soccer in the time of swine...
...take it seriously, ignore it or begin freebasing hand sanitizer to get through the day. As with all viruses, influenza's only function is to replicate itself. It makes you sneeze so it can infect a new host and reproduce. When it encounters resistance, it changes. For the brain, this is maddening: How do we capture a threat that routinely escapes from one box and reappears in another...
...further confuse matters, influenza is inconsistent. It may lay siege to one town and leave the next untouched. That too perplexes the brain. We wonder why one school system shuts down and another stays open. We can't identify a pattern that makes sense...