It’s Not the Scary Things that Kill You

Recently that the German government moved to phase out nuclear energy in the country. The industry, it reckoned, poses an unacceptable risk to the health of the population, despite the fact that its atomic energy program is well regulated and has never resulted in an injury or death.

Coincidentally, around the same time an outbreak of E. coli spread by organic bean sprouts killed dozens of people in the country. Yet in the aftermath no one suggested that organic vegetables should be banned.

Clearly, what the general public perceives as dangerous is very different from mortality statistics alone would tell us. Are we simply irrational, or is there an underlying logic behind our intuitive perception of risk?

For answers, I turned to David Ropeik, a well-known risk management consultant, fellow Psychology Today blogger, and author of How Risky Is It, Really?: Why Our Fears Don’t Always Match the Facts.

JW: Can you explain this disparity to me, between the reaction to atomic power and to the E. coli outbreak?

DR: Risk is subjective, a mix of the few facts we have at any given time, and how those facts feel. We have developed a set of instincts that help us gauge potentially risky situations, quickly, before all the facts are in. Which is pretty important for survival, though it may not make for the most fact-based, rational choices. In essence, risks have personality traits, psychological characteristics that make some feel scarier than others, the statistics and facts notwithstanding.

JW: So what’s the personality of nuclear power? Continue reading It’s Not the Scary Things that Kill You

Is Storm Chasing Immoral?

For me one of the most disturbing aspects of the Joplin tornado, which left at least 117 people dead when it struck southwestern Missouri on May 22, is that it was pursued by at least two teams of storm chasers, one of which was filming for a national TV show. Some might argue that storm chasers serve a valuable scientific purpose in gathering data that will allow the destructive forces of tornadoes to be better understood and predicted, so that lives will be saved in the future. And it’s true that after the Joplin tornado, as is often the case, storm chasers were among the first on hand to help the survivors, arriving well before EMTs and firemen. But for me it’s impossible to overlook the fact that for most who undertake it, storm chasing is strictly a recreational activity. The emotional reality is that storm chasers enjoying immersing themselves in a force of nature that takes lives. Indeed, their activities may actively contribute to the death toll.

It’s been 12 years since I went tornado-hunting myself. I was reporting a story about weather junkies for a now-defunct magazine. I spent a long day driving around Oklahoma with Cloud 9 Tours (which was one of the outfits on hand for this year’s Joplin twister), then got caught up in reporting the aftermath of that year’s deadly tornado, an F5 twister that tore through the town of Moore, Oklahoma. It was one death in particular that made me forever question the morality of storm chasing. I was never tempted to go again. Continue reading Is Storm Chasing Immoral?

Apocalypse Today: The Allure of Bad Theory

As I post this, the world is supposed to be ending, according to a fervent group of Christian cultists. Despite the insignificant size of their membership, the group has attracted an enormous amount of press attention and internet buzz – mostly, I think, because of the remarkable self-confidence with which they peddle their lunatic project. How, we wonder, could someone believe something so baseless – and embrace it so fervently?

We should not be so smug. Erroneous theories aren’t just the province of the lunatic fringe. They’re part of everyone’s basic cognitive legacy. We are hardwired for a phenomenon I call “theory lock,” a predilection rooted in the fact that there’s one concept that the human brain finds almost impossible to grasp: “I don’t know.”

Our minds recoil from uncertainty. We are wired to find order in randomness and chaos. We look at clouds and see sheep. We look at stock price charts and detect patterns. We read our horoscope and think “yes, that totally applies to me!”

In evolutionary terms, this can be a useful feature. After all, when it comes to making decisions, we’re helpless without a theory, a way to make sense of the situation that we’re in. Powerlessness is a deeply upsetting and stressful condition. So when a theory, even a weak one, presents itself amid an explanatory vacuum, we instinctively seize hold and hang on for dear life.

Once we have a theory in our grasp, we begin to see everything through its lens. Information that otherwise seem ambiguous, or even contradictory to that theory, is understood within its framework. And so just by holding a belief we tend to gradually strengthen our conviction that it is true, a tendency that psychologists dub “confirmation bias.”

It’s hard to overstate the power of this effect. Continue reading Apocalypse Today: The Allure of Bad Theory

Right Wingers and the Reptile Brain

If you happen to be of the left-leaning persuasion, I imagine that you will find the results of this recent study quite satisfying. Researchers in the UK asked test subjects about their political leanings, and then scanned their brains. Guess what? They found that liberals tended to have more volume in an area of the brain called the anterior cingulated cortex (ACC), a region associated with, among other things, decision making. Conservatives, on the other hand, showed more heft in the amygdala, the region associated with emotional memory and in particular with the processing of fear. Writes Time magazine:

These structural differences, the authors suggest, support previous reports of differences in personality: liberals tend to be better at managing conflicting information, while conservatives are thought to be better at recognizing threats, researchers said. “Previously, some psychological traits were known to be predictive of an individual’s political orientation,” said [lead researcher Ryota] Kanai in a press release. “Our study now links such personality traits with specific brain structure.”

If you wear Tevas and clothes made out of organically grown hemp, this will seem intuitively obvious. After all, liberals arrive at their views through logical reasoning, while conservatives operate on a purely emotion-driven level, like reptiles. Right?

 Not so fast. Continue reading Right Wingers and the Reptile Brain

How Fear Destroyed a Career

Up until three weeks ago, Tom Durkin was hard at work, studying for the upcoming running of the Kentucky Derby. For a decade he had been the voice of “the greatest two minutes in sports,” calling out the position of the horses as they round the turns and approach the finish line. To prepare, he spent weeks memorizing the horses and their liveries and studied videos of other races around the country. But as the big day drew near, his anxiety began to soar. He was assaulted by waves of panic that sent his heart racing. It was not a new feeling; Durkin had been battling performance anxiety for years. This time, however, he realized that he was up against an emotional turmoil he could not handle. And so, the New York Times reports, he called up race officials and tendered his resignation. An impressive career, cut short.

Reading the story, I felt compassion for Durkin, who had fallen victim to one of fear’s most agonizing and intractable manifestations. And I wondered how many other careers have been cut short, or held back, by runaway fear. You don’t have to be a performer to suffer from performance anxiety – anyone who has to give talks before an audience, or even speak up at meetings, is at risk of a debilitating attack of stage fright. Continue reading How Fear Destroyed a Career

The Mystery of Clutch Performance

A few days ago I was contacted by Mike Sielski, a Wall Street Journal reporter working on an article about New York Rangers hockey player Chris Drury. Drury hasn’t been having a very good season, but in the past he was legendary for his ability to pull of amazing feats of athleticism just when his team needed it — when the pressure was highest. Writes Sielski, in his piece which just went up today:

In Game 5 of the ’07 Eastern Conference semifinals, as a member of the Buffalo Sabres, Drury scored a tying goal with less than eight seconds left in regulation against the Rangers, lifting a rebound over goaltender Henrik Lundqvist. Buffalo won the game in overtime and the series in six games, and Lundqvist still remembers shattering his stick to pieces by slamming it against a wall after Drury’s goal.

Sielski had called me to ask how it might be possible, in psychological terms, to account for such phenomenal feats of skill. I pointed out to him that my book Extreme Fear is pretty much geared to answering that question — the book is framed around the mystery of how aerobatic pilot Neil Williams managed to figure out how to save his life when his plane’s wing started to fall off at low altitude. The conclusion I reached in writing the book, I told Sielski, is that a person who is highly skilled in a particular domain can tap the automatic part of their brain to an astonishing degree even when under the sort of life-or-death pressure that shuts down the conscious mind. As Sielski quotes me in the article:

In stressful situations, certain individuals with expertise in a given field—an elite ice hockey player, for example—”can make connections automatically and quickly and effortlessly in a way that might seem impossible,” Jeff Wise, author of the book “Extreme Fear: The Science of Your Mind in Danger,” said in a phone interview. “They’re seeing the opportunity, the chance. They’re able to play the odds in a way a less sophisticated person wouldn’t. There is a kind of athletic intelligence that can emerge most powerfully in a clutch moment.”

As a reporter myself, I fully understand the understand the necessity of keeping quotes short and to the point, so I never expected Sielski to include the caveats that I expressed over the phone Continue reading The Mystery of Clutch Performance

Dude, Your Jetpack’s Here

 

Just spent the morning doing something I’ve  been wanting to try for years: Fly a jetpack. JetLev, the unit’s manufacturer, just completed the first production model and let me be the first media to experience it first-hand. Instead of a rocket expelling hot gas, you’ve got twin nozzles shooting out high volumes of water at low pressure. You’re tethered to the surface by a 33-foot-long flexible hose. It’s a total hoot. Note that I’d only been flying this contraption for a few minutes when the video was taken. I got better — a little — after logging about 30 minutes total flying time; I was able to go higher and keep the thing under better control; the demo pilots can pull off some really impressive flying. I’ll be writing about the experience soon for Popular Mechanics.

How Dogs Read Our Minds

I’m currently in northernmost Quebec, in the Inuit village of Puvirnituq. The seemingly endless expanse of snow and ice, the biting subzero temperatures and the howling wind, powerfully drive home the resourcefulness of the Inuit, who for over a thousand years thrived in this unforgiving landscape with only stone-age technology. But what powerful technology it was: fire, seal-skin anoraks, snow-carving knives for making igloos, and above all, dogs. Yesterday afternoon I went for a dog-sled ride with expert musher Jean-Marie Novalinga, whose team pulled us across a flat, wind-scoured landscape. Unlike dog teams in Alaska, those in this part of the Arctic are harnessed in a loose fan formation, as if one were being pulled by a feral pack of dogs. One there in the empty expanse, man and dog working together, the partnership feels like a very primal relationship indeed.

It is, at heart, both a practical relationship and a deeply emotional one. “You have to feel connection to your dogs,” Novalinga said. “It’s the only way to work together.”

Anyone who has ever lived with a dog knows what he means by connection. Humans and dogs have a way of intuiting one another’s emotions – of feeling like we know what the other is feeling — that is unique among all the species on earth. But how they can achieve it is something of a biological puzzle. After all, dogs and humans are not particularly closely related species. Our last common ancestor lived far back during the age of dinosaurs. Dogs are more closely related to whales than they are to us. We are more closely related to mice than to dogs. So why should we feel such a powerful and unique bond? Continue reading How Dogs Read Our Minds

Interview: Fear, Death and The Psychology of Fight Club

I recently did a fun interview with Joshua Chaplinsky over at The Cult, the Chuck Palahniuk web site. Our conversation ranged over the mechanisms of fear, the meaning of death, how I wound up writing about adventure science. Chaplinsky begins by writing:

Fear is the mind-killer; it is the little-death that brings total obliteration. Whether you are a soldier on the battlefield or a housewife cornered by a cockroach, it is a formidable foe. It can heighten your senses, providing a performance enhancing jolt of adrenaline, yet it can also cause your body to completely shut down on itself. They say only the strong survive, but the many x-factors associated with the fear response pose a danger to even the most well prepared individual. Despite this, good old fashioned knowledge is still your best defense in a dangerous situation. And nobody is more aware of that fact than science writer/outdoor adventurer Jeff Wise.

You can read the whole piece here.

Could a Sendai-sized Earthquake Hit the US?

The massive tremors and ensuing tsunami that devastated Japan earlier this month was an order of magnitude more destructive than anything that has hit the continental Unites States in historical times. But seismologists say that a similar event could well strike here. In fact, it’s only a matter of time. And compared to Japan, we’re far less prepared to deal with the consequences.

The danger zone is not California. While Los Angeles and San Francisco suffer frequent damaging quakes, they owe their seismic woes to a relatively shallow phenomenon called a slip-strike fault, caused by two tectonic plates sliding against each other. Sendai was a result of something far more dangerous: a so-called subduction zone, a deep-lying discontinuity caused by one plate slowly burying itself under another.

In both cases, earthquakes are caused by the slow building of pressure as the two plates move relative to one another, but remained locked together at the fault line. The strain increases steadily until the fault gives way, releasing the energy in the form of an earthquake. While strike-slip faults are relatively shallow, a subduction fault is deeper and can release a lot more energy. “One of the signatures of this type of fault,” says Mike Blanpied, associate director of the US Geological Survey’s Earthquake Hazards Program, “is that they sit quietly until they create a giant quake.”And by giant, he means monster. The Sendai event contained more than 30 times the energy of the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906.

Only one such region lies within the Lower 48. Continue reading Could a Sendai-sized Earthquake Hit the US?