Some religious people regard scientists as foul heathens, which is terribly unfair. We aren’t all that foul. On the other hand, we do tend to be heathens. The most fundamental principle of science is that beliefs must be predicated on empirical evidence —- things that everyone can see, touch, taste, and measure —- and in more than two thousand years of recorded history, no one has yet produced a shred of empirical evidence for the existence of God. That hasn’t kept most people from believing. For as long as pollsters have been asking the question, roughly 90% of Americans have been claiming to believe in God, and a sizeable majority believes that God takes a personal interest in their lives and intervenes to help them. When President Bush said, “God told me to strike at al Qaeda and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did,” most Americans were not alarmed to learn that their leader was receiving orders that no one else could hear. America is an unusually religious nation, but even in the world’s least religious nations the majority of people claim to believe in God.

Scientists understand all this piety and faith by assuming that belief in God is one of the many primitive superstitions that human beings are in the process of shedding. God is a myth that has been handed down from one generation of innocents to the next, and science is slowly teaching them to cultivate their skepticism and shed their credulity. As Albert Einstein wrote:

“(I had) a deep religiosity, which, however, found an abrupt ending at the age of 12. Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true. The consequence was a positively fanatic orgy of freethinking coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the state through lies. It was a crushing impression. Suspicion against every kind of authority grew out of this experience, a skeptical attitude towards the convictions which were alive in any specific social environment —- an attitude which has never again left me.” (Autobiographical Notes, 1949)

Einstein’s orgy of freethinking forever changed our understanding of space and time, and the phrase “Religion for Dummies” became, in the view of many scientists, a redundancy.

But this conceptualization of religious belief misses an important point, namely, that people don’t believe in God simply because they are told to by their elders, but because they are compelled to by their own experience. William James understood that religious belief grows out of human experience, and he urged scientists to investigate the experiences that spawned it:

“I speak not now of your ordinary religious believer (whose)… religion has been made for him by others, communicated to him by tradition, determined to fixed forms by imitation, and retained by habit. It would profit us little to study this second-hand religious life. We must make search rather for the original experiences which were the pattern-setters to all this mass of suggested feeling and imitated conduct.” (The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902)

If belief in God is compelled by experience, then what sorts of experiences compel it?

Curious Order and Empty Form

Nobody needs God to explain why orgasms feel good and root canals don’t. God’s job is to provide an explanation for experiences that are otherwise baffling and inexplicable. These curious experiences need not involve seeing angels or speaking in tongues, but may instead be of the garden variety. Consider the ordinary experience of order. The naturalist, William Paley, laid the groundwork for the modern notion of intelligent design when he asked us to imagine what we would conclude were we to come across a watch lying on the ground.

“The inference we think is inevitable, that the watch must have had a maker —- that there must have existed, at some time and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer, who comprehended its construction and designed its use.” (Natural Theology, 1802)

In other words, a watch is not a random assemblage of parts, but a structured, ordered, obviously non-random assemblage of parts —- and non-random assemblages require explanations. The existence of an intelligent assembler is a tempting explanation if only because it is at once so familiar and so complete. For most people, the material universe, biological life, and human consciousness are the kinds of curious, complex, well-ordered phenomena that require explanation, and an intelligent designer seems to provide just that.

But there are at least two problems with this explanation. First, explanations that rely on the inexplicable are not explanations at all. They have the form of explanations, but they do not have the content. Yet, psychology experiments reveal that people are often satisfied by empty form. For instance, when experimenters approached people who were standing in line at a photocopy machine and said, “Can I get ahead of you?” the typical answer was no. But when they added to the end of this request the words “because I need to make some copies,” the typical answer was yes. The second request used the word “because” and hence sounded like an explanation, and the fact that this explanation told them nothing that they didn’t already know was oddly irrelevant.

In another study, experimenters approached people in a library, handed them a card with a $1 coin attached, and then walked away. Some people received the card on the top, and some received the card on the bottom.

Although the two extra questions on the bottom card —- “Who are we?” and “Why do we do this?” —- provide no information whatsoever, they do give one the sense that puzzling questions have been posed and then answered. The results of the study showed that the people who received the bottom card were, in fact, less curious and less delighted twenty minutes after receiving it than were people who received the top card because only the latter felt that something wonderful and inexplicable had happened. In short, what William Paley did not realize is that statements such as “God made it” can satiate the appetite for explanation without providing any nutritional value.

The second problem with Paley’s argument is that highly ordered phenomena can and do emerge from random processes. If we toss a coin for long enough, we eventually observe some highly ordered strings such as “head, head, head, head, head, head” or “head, tail, head, tail, head, tail.” Statisticians have sophisticated techniques that can help determine whether a particular pattern of coin flips is so unlikely that it (like Paley’s watch) can only be explained by a non-random process. But research in psychology has shown that people have rather poor intuitions in this regard, and that they tend to mistake the products of random processes for the products of non-random processes but not the other way around. For example, if we tossed a coin and it came up heads five times in a row, many of us would suspect that the outcome of these flips was non-random and we would search for an explanation (“Maybe one side of the coin has been worn away” or “Perhaps there is a magnet hidden in the ceiling”).

That’s a mistake. Because while the odds of tossing five heads in a row by random chance are not tremendous, they are not slight. In fact, they are roughly three in a hundred, which are greater than the odds of being killed by a terrorist or infected by HIV —- and those odds strike most of us as great enough to justify unusual preventative measures, such as military tribunals, extraordinary rendition, and monogamy. When people look out on the natural world and declare that there must be a God because all of this could surely not have happened by chance, they are not overestimating the orderly complexity of nature. Rather, they are underestimating the power of chance to produce it.

The Illusion of External Agency

Our tendency to underestimate the power of random processes to create order leads us to seek explanations where none are needed. Our tendency to be satisfied by well-formed utterances that are devoid of content compels us to accept explanations when none are provided. Psychological research has uncovered a third tendency that may also play a powerful role in creating the kinds of experiences that compel people to believe in God.

If we glance at a Necker cube (named after the Swiss crystallographer who discovered it in 1832) we have the sense that we are looking across at a box that has a dot on its left inside corner. But if we stare for a few moments, the cube suddenly shifts, and we have the sense that we are looking down at a box that has a dot sitting on its lower left edge. (If you have any trouble seeing this illusion, you’ll find a more riveting version at dogfeathers.com/java/necker.html). A Necker cube is an ambiguous object, which is to say that there is more than one way to see it, and our brains happily jump between these different views, trying one and then switching to another. But experiments show that if we are rewarded for seeing the cube one way rather than the other —- rewarded with a jellybean, a dollar bill, or a friendly pat on the back —- our brains begin to hold on to the rewarding view, and the cube stops changing. The lesson here is that things can be viewed in many ways, but human brains like the most rewarding view and thus they search for and hold on to that view whenever they can.

Objects may be somewhat ambiguous, but events are thoroughly ambiguous. If there are two ways to see a Necker cube, then there are dozens of ways to see a marriage, a promotion, an illness, or a bankruptcy. When Shakespeare wrote “For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so,” he was reminding us that events can be thought of in many different ways, and that the way we think of them —- identify them, construe them, name them, explain them —- determines whether or not we find them rewarding. When we hear “Don’t forget to take your umbrella!” as a nagging indictment, we feel annoyed; but when we hear it as a loving reminder, we feel valued. Luckily for us, the human brain tends to search for and hold onto the most rewarding view of events, much as it does of objects.

Our ability to find and embrace the most rewarding view of the circumstances that befall us is nothing short of remarkable, which is why people adapt so quickly and so well to almost every form of tragedy and trauma. When people lose someone they love, they feel sad —- but research shows that very few become chronically depressed, and most experience only low levels of short-lived distress. More than half of all Americans experience a traumatic event such as rape, physical assault, or natural disaster, but very few ever require professional assistance. As a leading group of trauma researchers recently noted, “Resilience is often the most commonly observed outcome trajectory following exposure to a potentially traumatic event.” Indeed, a significant portion of those who survive major traumas not only do well, but claim that their lives were enhanced by the experience.

Fine. But what does any of this have to do with belief in God? As it turns out, most people do not know that their brains are designed to find and hold on to the most rewarding view of things. Most of the business brains do they do quietly, in the background, offstage, where we can’t observe it. As such, we are surprised when experiences we once feared and avoided turn out to be much less awful than we had anticipated, and we are deeply surprised when they turn out to be blessings in disguise. Who knew that widowhood or divorce would be an opportunity to meet the partner of our dreams? Who knew that a heart attack or a prison sentence would lead us to refocus our lives and concentrate on the things that matter? And who knew —- when we were making that agonizing decision between the Honda and the Mazda, between Cincinnati and Chicago, between the ballpark and the ballet or the asparagus and the artichoke —- that this one would turn out be so obviously better than that?

Surprises such as these are curious events, and curious events beg for explanation. The proper explanation is that we have brains that avidly pursue the most rewarding view of things. The other explanation is providence. If there is a God who watches over us, who guides our hand when we are uncertain, who leads us to places we might not otherwise go, then unanticipated good fortune makes perfect sense. Things turn out for the best because someone who knows what is best for us is making them turn out that way.

Research suggests that people may mistakenly attribute the good fortune that is the natural product of a helpful brain to the intervention of a helpful agent. For instance, in a study done in my laboratory, female volunteers were told that they would be working on a two-person task that required them to have a teammate whom they liked and trusted. The volunteers were shown four folders, each of which contained the biography of a potential teammate. They were told that before reading the biographies they must choose a folder randomly, and that the person whose biography was in the chosen folder would be their teammate. The volunteers looked at the four folders, chose one randomly, and then read the biography they found inside. What the volunteers did not know was that the experimenter had put the same biography in all four folders, and that it was the biography of someone who was not particularly likeable or trustworthy.

So what happened? As the volunteers read the biography, their brains naturally did what brains do best: They searched for, found, and held on to the best possible view of the teammate (“Her bio says that she doesn’t like people all that much, but I bet she’s just an exceptionally discerning person”). When volunteers finished reading their new teammate’s biography, they were given three other biographies to read, and they were then asked to rate all four of the biographies. Not surprisingly, the volunteers rated their teammate as superior to the others. The volunteers liked their teammates best because they had brains that knew how to find the most rewarding view of their current circumstances.

Now comes the interesting part. After the volunteers read and rated the biographies, the experimenter took the volunteer aside and made a confession. The experimenter explained that while the volunteer had been “randomly choosing” a folder, the experimenter had been using a subliminal message to try to make the volunteer choose the best possible partner. This wasn’t true, of course, but the volunteers believed it. Then the volunteers were asked the critical question: “Do you think the subliminal message had any effect on your choice of folders?” The results showed that, by and large, volunteers thought the subliminal message had guided their choice of folders. Although they had been given a relatively dislikeable teammate, their brains had managed to find a rewarding view of that teammate; but because they did not know that their brains deserved the credit for their good fortune, they gave the credit to a subliminal message. After all, they clearly chose the best possible teammate, and there had to be some explanation for their extraordinary luck!

This study wasn’t about subliminal messages, of course. Like many psychological studies, this one was meant to be an allegory. It suggests that under some circumstances people can misattribute the uplifting work that their brains have done to a fictitious external source. Brains strive to provide the best view of things, but because the owners of those brains don’t know this, they are surprised when things seem to turn out for the best. To explain this surprising fact, people sometimes invoke an external source —- a subliminal message in the laboratory, God in everyday life.

Coda

Is God is nothing more than an attempt to explain order and good fortune by those who do not understand the mathematics of chance, the principles of self-organizing systems, or the psychology of the human mind? When the study I just described was accepted for publication, I recall asking one of my collaborators, who is a deeply religious man, how he felt about having demonstrated that people can misattribute the products of their own minds to powerful external agents. He said, “I feel fine. After all, God doesn’t want us to confuse our miracles with his.”

That’s fair enough. Science rules out the most cartoonish versions of God by debunking specific claims about ancient civilizations in North America or the creatio ex nihilo of human life. But it cannot tell us whether there is a force or entity or idea beyond our ken that deserves to be known as God. What we can say is that the universe is a complex place, that events within it often seem to turn out for the best, and that neither of these facts requires an explanation beyond our own skins.

[Note: The experiments described in this essay are drawn from the following papers: Gilbert, D. T., Brown, R. P., Pinel, E. C., & Wilson, T. D. (2000). The illusion of external agency. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79, 690-700; Langer, E. J., Blank, A., & Chanowitz, B. (1978). The mindlessness of ostensibly thoughtful action: The role of “placebic” information in interpersonal interaction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36, 635-642; Wilson, T. D., Centerbar, D. B., Kermer, D. A., & Gilbert, D. T. (2005). The pleasures of uncertainty: Prolonging positive moods in ways people do not anticipate. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 88, 5-21. ‘]

Posted by Dan Gilbert on November 12, 2006 | E-mail this post

July 24, 2006: Tears in the Wayback

I’m always a bit surprised when people write hateful things to me (or about me) simply because we hold different opinions on some issue. My LA Times essay on global warming (click here) brought more than the usual amount of obscene mail from…well, what do you call someone who refuses to believe that the sky is falling? Chicken Big?

But my favorite ad hominem attack of the week came from a blogger who read my Time essay on children and happiness (click here) and wrote: “Dr. Gilbert is a very bitter and misguided man who needs to experience fatherhood before he again attempts to write with authority on the subject.” Yes, it was painful for me to learn that I am bitter and misguided. But it was even more painful to learn that I am not a father. I called my 30 year old son to give him the bad news, and he too was chagrined to find that we are unrelated.

Any time I publish an essay I get email from people who disagree. Some are polite and thoughtful, and they give me faith in the power of civil discourse to educate and enlighten. But some are just shamelessly vulgar, vitriolic, and vituperative. I find myself wondering why these folks are so damned angry, and why they think it is okay to lash out at a perfect stranger.

These thoughts were in mind last week as I watched news coverage of the situation in the Middle East. Like so many other commentators, I am struck by the intractable nature of this conflict—-by the seemingly endless cycles of attack and retaliation. No one knows what it takes to break this kind of recursive loop, but psychologists have learned a few things about loops and cycles that I thought might be worth sharing. So I wrote the following essay, which appeared in today’s New York Times.

I hope you find it interesting—-but if not, please don’t write to tell me that I should experience brotherhood before writing about it. I’m getting pretty low on relatives as it is.

He Who Cast the First Stone Probably Didn’t
New York Times, July 24, 2006

Long before seat belts or common sense were particularly widespread, my family made annual trips to New York in our 1963 Valiant station wagon. Mom and Dad took the front seat, my infant sister sat in my mother’s lap and my brother and I had what we called “the wayback” all to ourselves.

In the wayback, we’d lounge around doing puzzles, reading comics and counting license plates. Eventually we’d fight. When our fight had finally escalated to the point of tears, our mother would turn around to chastise us, and my brother and I would start to plead our cases. “But he hit me first,” one of us would say, to which the other would inevitably add, “But he hit me harder.”

It turns out that my brother and I were not alone in believing that these two claims can get a puncher off the hook. In virtually every human society, “He hit me first” provides an acceptable rationale for doing that which is otherwise forbidden. Both civil and religious law provide long lists of behaviors that are illegal or immoral —- unless they are responses in kind, in which case they are perfectly fine.

After all, it is wrong to punch anyone except a puncher, and our language even has special words —- like “retaliation” and “retribution” and “revenge” —- whose common prefix is meant to remind us that a punch thrown second is legally and morally different than a punch thrown first. That’s why participants in every one of the globe’s intractable conflicts —- from Ireland to the Middle East —- offer the even-numberedness of their punches as grounds for exculpation.

The problem with the principle of even-numberedness is that people count differently. Every action has a cause and a consequence: something that led to it and something that followed from it. But research shows that while people think of their own actions as the consequences of what came before, they think of other people’s actions as the causes of what came later.

In a study conducted by William Swann and colleagues at the University of Texas, pairs of volunteers played the roles of world leaders who were trying to decide whether to initiate a nuclear strike. The first volunteer was asked to make an opening statement, the second volunteer was asked to respond, the first volunteer was asked to respond to the second, and so on. At the end of the conversation, the volunteers were shown several of the statements that had been made and were asked to recall what had been said just before and just after each of them.

The results revealed an intriguing asymmetry: When volunteers were shown one of their own statements, they naturally remembered what had led them to say it. But when they were shown one of their conversation partner’s statements, they naturally remembered how they had responded to it. In other words, volunteers remembered the causes of their own statements and the consequences of their partner’s statements.

What seems like a grossly self-serving pattern of remembering is actually the product of two innocent facts. First, because our senses point outward, we can observe other people’s actions but not our own. Second, because mental life is a private affair, we can observe our own thoughts but not the thoughts of others. Together, these facts suggest that our reasons for punching will always be more salient to us than the punches themselves —- but that the opposite will be true of other people’s reasons and other people’s punches.

Examples aren’t hard to come by. Shiites seek revenge on Sunnis for the revenge they sought on Shiites; Irish Catholics retaliate against the Protestants who retaliated against them; and since 1948, it’s hard to think of any partisan in the Middle East who has done anything but play defense. In each of these instances, people on one side claim that they are merely responding to provocation and dismiss the other side’s identical claim as disingenuous spin. But research suggests that these claims reflect genuinely different perceptions of the same bloody conversation.

If the first principle of legitimate punching is that punches must be even-numbered, the second principle is that an even-numbered punch may be no more forceful than the odd-numbered punch that preceded it. Legitimate retribution is meant to restore balance, and thus an eye for an eye is fair, but an eye for an eyelash is not. When the European Union condemned Israel for bombing Lebanon in retaliation for the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers, it did not question Israel’s right to respond, but rather, its “disproportionate use of force.” It is O.K. to hit back, just not too hard.

Research shows that people have as much trouble applying the second principle as the first. In a study conducted by Sukhwinder Shergill and colleagues at University College London, pairs of volunteers were hooked up to a mechanical device that allowed each of them to exert pressure on the other volunteer’s fingers.

The researcher began the game by exerting a fixed amount of pressure on the first volunteer’s finger. The first volunteer was then asked to exert precisely the same amount of pressure on the second volunteer’s finger. The second volunteer was then asked to exert the same amount of pressure on the first volunteer’s finger. And so on. The two volunteers took turns applying equal amounts of pressure to each other’s fingers while the researchers measured the actual amount of pressure they applied.

The results were striking. Although volunteers tried to respond to each other’s touches with equal force, they typically responded with about 40 percent more force than they had just experienced. Each time a volunteer was touched, he touched back harder, which led the other volunteer to touch back even harder. What began as a game of soft touches quickly became a game of moderate pokes and then hard prods, even though both volunteers were doing their level best to respond in kind.

Each volunteer was convinced that he was responding with equal force and that for some reason the other volunteer was escalating. Neither realized that the escalation was the natural byproduct of a neurological quirk that causes the pain we receive to seem more painful than the pain we produce, so we usually give more pain than we have received.

Research teaches us that our reasons and our pains are more palpable, more obvious and real, than are the reasons and pains of others. This leads to the escalation of mutual harm, to the illusion that others are solely responsible for it and to the belief that our actions are justifiable responses to theirs.

None of this is to deny the roles that hatred, intolerance, avarice and deceit play in human conflict. It is simply to say that basic principles of human psychology are important ingredients in this miserable stew. Until we learn to stop trusting everything our brains tell us about others —- and to start trusting others themselves —- there will continue to be tears and recriminations in the wayback

Here are references for the research described in this essay:

• Swann Jr. W. B., Pelham, B. W., & Roberts, D. C. (1987). Causal chunking: Memory and inference in ongoing interaction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 53, 858-865.

• Shergill, S. S., Bays, P. M., Frith, C. D., & Wolpert, D. M. (2003). Two eyes for an eye: The neuroscience of force escalation. Science, 301, 187.

Posted by Dan Gilbert on July 24, 2006 | E-mail this post

July 2, 2006: It’s The End Of The World As We Know It And I Feel Fine

Next time I’m in the Bay area I’m going to stop by Kepler’s Bookstore (click here) and kiss all the clerks because Stumbling on Happiness is now their bestselling hardcover nonfiction title. Although I was delighted to have found a store where I outsold Ann Coulter and several fine books about pets, I was not pleased to see that I also outsold Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth (click here). But more about that in a moment.

Let me first thank some readers who took time to alert me to errors in Stumbling on Happiness. Matt Denio pointed out two places in the book in which I refer to the pupils of the eye contracting when, in fact, I meant dilating. Yikes. This error will be fixed in the next printing, which is just about to happen. By the way, the new cover will have a quote from Malcolm Gladwell’s review on Amazon.com, so if you own a copy of the first printing, you now own a rare book that is probably worth two to five cents more than you paid for it.

I was also delighted to receive an email from Moss Kaplan, who taught me about the circus. In Stumbling, I cheekily suggest that we experience an illusion when we see a large numbers of clowns exit a very small car. Moss writes:

As it happens, I was a circus clown with Ringling Brothers almost two decades ago, and I laughed at your mention of the “illusion” of the merry clowns piling out of the tiny car. On this one point you are actually quite mistaken. There is no illusion. The clowns really do all “fit” in the car. I know this because for more than a year, as the new clown on the road, I had the miserable privilege of being the first to climb in and the last to get out. Thirteen times a week. Limbs contorted and squashed, a clown nicknamed Nasty and his putrid breath an inch from my face, all eighteen-plus clowns sat there until it was time to pile out with happy faces plastered on. The only ‘trick” is that the car has had its seats removed and little holes drilled into the body so we wouldn’t suffocate.

I stand corrected, and apologize to squished and beleaguered clowns worldwide. Live and learn.

Speaking of living and learning, it seems to me that we will soon be doing a lot less of the former unless we do a lot more of the latter. An editor from the Los Angeles Times called me recently with a very good question that went something like this: “If global warming is the devastating threat that Al Gore says it is, then why aren’t people freaking out about it? And don’t tell me that people just don’t care about the future because people do all sorts of things with the future in mind, such as quitting smoking and saving for retirement. But for some reason they don’t seem to get bent out of shape over global warming. What can psychology tell us about that?”

I don’t know if I’d ever thought about this question consciously before, but I must have been thinking about it unconsciously for quite some time because once the question was posed, the answers came quickly. The resulting essay was published today in the Los Angeles Times, and I reproduce it for you here. I keep having the odd thought that I will someday look back on this and realize that it was the only important thing I ever wrote.

If Only Gay Sex Caused Global Warming
Los Angeles Times, July 2, 2006

No one seems to care about the upcoming attack on the World Trade Center site. Why? Because it won’t involve villains with box cutters. Instead, it will involve melting ice sheets that swell the oceans and turn that particular block of lower Manhattan into an aquarium.

The odds of this happening in the next few decades are better than the odds that a disgruntled Saudi will sneak onto an airplane and detonate a shoe bomb. And yet our government will spend billions of dollars this year to prevent global terrorism and … well, essentially nothing to prevent global warming.

Why are we less worried about the more likely disaster? Because the human brain evolved to respond to threats that have four features —- features that terrorism has and that global warming lacks.

First, global warming lacks a mustache. No, really. We are social mammals whose brains are highly specialized for thinking about others. Understanding what others are up to —- what they know and want, what they are doing and planning —- has been so crucial to the survival of our species that our brains have developed an obsession with all things human. We think about people and their intentions; talk about them; look for and remember them.

That’s why we worry more about anthrax (with an annual death toll of roughly zero) than influenza (with an annual death toll of a quarter-million to a half-million people). Influenza is a natural accident, anthrax is an intentional action, and the smallest action captures our attention in a way that the largest accident doesn’t. If two airplanes had been hit by lightning and crashed into a New York skyscraper, few of us would be able to name the date on which it happened.

Global warming isn’t trying to kill us, and that’s a shame. If climate change had been visited on us by a brutal dictator or an evil empire, the war on warming would be this nation’s top priority.

The second reason why global warming doesn’t put our brains on orange alert is that it doesn’t violate our moral sensibilities. It doesn’t cause our blood to boil (at least not figuratively) because it doesn’t force us to entertain thoughts that we find indecent, impious or repulsive. When people feel insulted or disgusted, they generally do something about it, such as whacking each other over the head, or voting. Moral emotions are the brain’s call to action.

Although all human societies have moral rules about food and sex, none has a moral rule about atmospheric chemistry. And so we are outraged about every breach of protocol except Kyoto. Yes, global warming is bad, but it doesn’t make us feel nauseated or angry or disgraced, and thus we don’t feel compelled to rail against it as we do against other momentous threats to our species, such as flag burning. The fact is that if climate change were caused by gay sex, or by the practice of eating kittens, millions of protesters would be massing in the streets.

The third reason why global warming doesn’t trigger our concern is that we see it as a threat to our futures —- not our afternoons. Like all animals, people are quick to respond to clear and present danger, which is why it takes us just a few milliseconds to duck when a wayward baseball comes speeding toward our eyes.

The brain is a beautifully engineered get-out-of-the-way machine that constantly scans the environment for things out of whose way it should right now get. That’s what brains did for several hundred million years —- and then, just a few million years ago, the mammalian brain learned a new trick: to predict the timing and location of dangers before they actually happened.

Our ability to duck that which is not yet coming is one of the brain’s most stunning innovations, and we wouldn’t have dental floss or 401(k) plans without it. But this innovation is in the early stages of development. The application that allows us to respond to visible baseballs is ancient and reliable, but the add-on utility that allows us to respond to threats that loom in an unseen future is still in beta testing.

We haven’t quite gotten the knack of treating the future like the present it will soon become because we’ve only been practicing for a few million years. If global warming took out an eye every now and then, OSHA would regulate it into nonexistence.

There is a fourth reason why we just can’t seem to get worked up about global warming. The human brain is exquisitely sensitive to changes in light, sound, temperature, pressure, size, weight and just about everything else. But if the rate of change is slow enough, the change will go undetected. If the low hum of a refrigerator were to increase in pitch over the course of several weeks, the appliance could be singing soprano by the end of the month and no one would be the wiser.

Because we barely notice changes that happen gradually, we accept gradual changes that we would reject if they happened abruptly. The density of Los Angeles traffic has increased dramatically in the last few decades, and citizens have tolerated it with only the obligatory grumbling. Had that change happened on a single day last summer, Angelenos would have shut down the city, called in the National Guard and lynched every politician they could get their hands on.

Environmentalists despair that global warming is happening so fast. In fact, it isn’t happening fast enough. If President Bush could jump in a time machine and experience a single day in 2056, he’d return to the present shocked and awed, prepared to do anything it took to solve the problem..

The human brain is a remarkable device that was designed to rise to special occasions. We are the progeny of people who hunted and gathered, whose lives were brief and whose greatest threat was a man with a stick. When terrorists attack, we respond with crushing force and firm resolve, just as our ancestors would have. Global warming is a deadly threat precisely because it fails to trip the brain’s alarm, leaving us soundly asleep in a burning bed.

It remains to be seen whether we can learn to rise to new occasions.

Posted by Dan Gilbert on July 2, 2006 | E-mail this post