poptech: dan gilbert
October 19, 2007 by Chris | permalink
‘It’s the end of the world as we know it’
a new idea is first condemned as ridiculous and then dismissed as trivial until finally, it becomes what everybody knows. William James, 1879
when you hold your fate in your hands, why do we make a fist? We respond to so many threats so why are we not responding to global warming. Our brain responds to specific threats with astonishing speed. However, these threats have four features:
1. a face. We are highly social mammals. The brain has special neural networks that are dedicated to processing information about people. It is the need to think of other people that drove the development of our brain millennia ago. One could say, that our brains are hyperobsessive to identify people.
2. Doesn’t violate our moral sensibilities. This is because it does not confront us with things or acts that we can see. [Ie food and sex] are ancient rules of behaviour.
3. We see it as a threat to our future, but not to us in the present. Our brain is an exquisitely designed ‘get out of the way’ driver. Thus, it developed a capacity to project danger. The size of the brain that deals with future is tiny compared to the reactive present
4. The brain is sensitive to relative changes not to absolue changes. Thus, when the rate of change of stimulus is slow enough. We do not recognize slow changes but do fast changes. One day at a time we have transfored the world into a place that our grandparents would not have dreamed of.
global warming does not have this. Global warming is not a 'real threat' that can be identified because it need to have:
we respond to PAIN – personal, abrupt, immoral and NOW
global warming is a threat, and a global threat, only because it is not happening fast engouth.
ASWESOME
