Blogreaders may have noticed that there is a lot more food, birds and music of late and less political material. Well, there is a reason for that. We live in a divided world and I don't want to add to the rancor. Although I clearly have a partisan bent I would rather focus on things that unite rather than things that divide.
I saw an interesting article recently at Science Daily, Your brain was never designed for this much bad news.
Turns out we are on overload, well people like me and my friend Steve anyway, people that process a lot of information.
Long before smartphones or even the printing press, our cognitive architecture was shaped by a single problem: stay alive long enough to reproduce. Our ancestors whose attention drifted past the rustle in the grass left fewer descendants than those who froze, looked and listened.
The brain that paid attention to threats was the brain that survived.
This is the foundation of what psychologists call the negativity bias, one of the most replicated findings in cognitive science. Across decades of research, the human mind has been shown to weigh negative information more heavily than positive, attend to it faster and remember it longer.
A predator nearby mattered more than a beautiful sunset. The cost of missing a real threat was death, while the cost of overreacting was a few minutes of wasted vigilance. The asymmetry made this bias adaptive.
Here is the problem: the human brain has not changed since then. We are the same species as we were thousands of years ago. What’s changed is the size of the world it’s asked to scan for threats.
In 2026, the same neurological system is being asked to absorb a war in one region, a financial shock in another, a climate disaster in a third and a violent crime in a fourth, all before lunchtime.A study published in the scientific journal Nature Human Behaviour examined more than 105,000 real news headlines viewed nearly six million times. Each additional negative word increased click-through rates, while positive words had the opposite effect.
Recent studies suggest people around the world demonstrate measurably stronger physiological responses to negative news than to positive news. The body is reacting before the mind has decided whether the threat is relevant
Some researchers have introduced a clinical framework for what happens in this instance called Problematic News Consumption (PNC) — a pattern of news engagement that results in preoccupation, dysregulation and disruption to daily functioning. In their 2022 study, the researchers found that 17 percent of American adults qualified as having severe levels of PNC. Among that group, 61 percent reported feeling unwell quite a bit or very much, compared with six percent of those who didn’t.
It is a good read, give it a look, that is, if you feel like getting triggered. Which brings me back to my friend Steve at the donut shop. You think I am a Cassandra with my negative news, Steve has a steady stream every morning.
I repeatedly tell him not to react, that it is bad for his health. I lost my faith in humanity a long time ago, don't think I have quite as big a problem, you just can't take this crazy life too seriously. It will literally make you sick.
In some ways I admire those friends of mine, many on the right, that never read the news or open a newspaper or website. Not that ignorance is bliss but the reality is that both the left and right live in these impenetrable media silos and often lack the critical thinking skills to discern what passes for truth these days.
So screw it, go fishing, bake a cake, climb a mountain. Just don't be constantly triggered. Not good for you.
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