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Human Brain a Poor Judge of Risk caught my eye this morning. If I’m understanding what author Bruce Schneier is getting at here, there are two distinct parts of the human brain for dealing with risk. The amygdala is an older part that intuits and reacts very quickly to risk and threat. The second part is the cortex, the part that reasons, but is much slower than the amygdala.

Fast, almost instant reactions are great if you spot a hungry tiger or lion eyeing you. No time to think about that, at least not if you want to continue strutting your stuff on this mortal coil. But most of us don’t live with the immenint threat of lions, tiger and bears. Still, there are risks and threats to be dealt with. The cortex has figured a way to deal with them: it develops rules of thumb or heuristics, using its ability to generalize situations. This can serve us well. But sometimes, not so well:

The problem is that they can fail us, especially in the context of a modern society. Our social and technological evolution has vastly outpaced our evolution as a species, and our brains are stuck with heuristics that are better suited to living in primitive and small family groups.

And when those heuristics fail, our feeling of security diverges from the reality of security.

That’s the last line in the Wired story, and I’m not sure how the story continues. A postscript says this story was adapted from a longer essay, but the link to that essay was broken when I tried it. Too bad; it would be nice to see what else he has to say.

Even so, one piece of the story caught my eye.

Some scary things are not really as risky as they seem, and others are better handled by staying in the scary situation to set up a more advantageous future response. This means there’s an evolutionary advantage to being able to hold off the reflexive fight-or-flight response while you work out a more sophisticated analysis of the situation and your options for handling it.

It strikes me that sharpening awareness of our bodily states might be one way to at least partially deal with this. Some argue that mind and body are one. Maybe, probably. But for many of us, how we experience that body, that self, can be … incomplete or inaccurate. Body awareness practices, like the Feldenkrais Method, can sharpen the connection for many who take the time and interest to do these sorts of practice.

But most of us might not have the time or interest or knowledge to practice such things at a level that makes it useful in everyday life. And that’s a risk in itself.

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