MAKING THE INVISIBLE PALPABLE
It's not just perceptual mistuning. If our emotional circuitry (partic farly the amygdala, the trigger point for the fight-or-flight response) perceives an immediate threat it will flood us with hor mones like cortisol and adrenaline, which ready us to hit or q.m. But this does not happen if we hear of potential dangers that might emerge in years or centuries to come; the amygdala hardly blinks.
The amygdala's circuitry, concentrated in the middle of the brain, operates automatically, bottom-up. We rely on it to be on the alert for dangers and tell us what we need to pay urgent attention to. But our automatic circuitry, usually so reliable in guiding our attention, have no perceptual apparatus or emotional loading for systems and their dangers. They draw a blank.
"It's easier to override an automatic, bottom-up response with top-down reasoning than it is to deal with the complete absence of a signal," Columbia University psychologist Elke Weber observes. "But that's the situation when it comes to dealing with the envi ronment. There's nothing here in the Hudson Valley on this lovely summer day to tell me the planet is warming."
"Ideally, some of my attention should go there-it's a long-term danger," adds Weber, whose work includes advising the National Academy of Sciences on environmental decision-making.5 "But there's no bottom-up message to pay attention to, nothing that says: 'Danger over here! Do something,' so this is much harder to address. We don't notice what's not there-and neither mental sys tem alerts us to this. It's the same with our health or our retirement savings. When we eat some very rich dessert, we don't get a signal telling us, 'If you keep this up, you'll die three years earlier.' And when you buy that spunky second car, nothing tells you, 'You will regret this when you are old and destitute.'"
Dr. Larry, whose mandate includes fighting global warming, puts it this way: "I have to persuade you that there's an odorless, tasteless, invisible gas that's gathering in the heavens and capturing the sun's heat because of what man does in using fossil fuels. It's a heavy lift.
MAKING THE INVISIBLE PALPABLE
It's not just perceptual mistuning. If our emotional circuitry (partic farly the amygdala, the trigger point for the fight-or-flight response) perceives an immediate threat it will flood us with hor mones like cortisol and adrenaline, which ready us to hit or q.m. But this does not happen if we hear of potential dangers that might emerge in years or centuries to come; the amygdala hardly blinks.
The amygdala's circuitry, concentrated in the middle of the brain, operates automatically, bottom-up. We rely on it to be on the alert for dangers and tell us what we need to pay urgent attention to. But our automatic circuitry, usually so reliable in guiding our attention, have no perceptual apparatus or emotional loading for systems and their dangers. They draw a blank.
"It's easier to override an automatic, bottom-up response with top-down reasoning than it is to deal with the complete absence of a signal," Columbia University psychologist Elke Weber observes. "But that's the situation when it comes to dealing with the envi ronment. There's nothing here in the Hudson Valley on this lovely summer day to tell me the planet is warming."
"Ideally, some of my attention should go there-it's a long-term danger," adds Weber, whose work includes advising the National Academy of Sciences on environmental decision-making.5 "But there's no bottom-up message to pay attention to, nothing that says: 'Danger over here! Do something,' so this is much harder to address. We don't notice what's not there-and neither mental sys tem alerts us to this. It's the same with our health or our retirement savings. When we eat some very rich dessert, we don't get a signal telling us, 'If you keep this up, you'll die three years earlier.' And when you buy that spunky second car, nothing tells you, 'You will regret this when you are old and destitute.'"
Dr. Larry, whose mandate includes fighting global warming, puts it this way: "I have to persuade you that there's an odorless, tasteless, invisible gas that's gathering in the heavens and capturing the sun's heat because of what man does in using fossil fuels. It's a heavy lift.
การแปล กรุณารอสักครู่..
