Why burgers are more dangerous than coronavirus.

A few months ago, I wrote a slightly moody, introspective piece on risk and how we measure it as individuals. To save you reading it, the gist of it was this: we’re incredibly bad at measuring risk and so we end making poor decisions about our lives based on regular misperceptions.

The science on this is well established. Human brains effectively have two mechanisms that measure risk. The first is one of the oldest parts of the brain that you’ll probably have heard of, the amygdala, which reacts automatically to risks. If I throw a stone at you, it’s the amygdala that kicks in to make you duck or shield yourself. The second mechanism is the neocortex, a newer and more complex part of the brain, that is used to analyse risks where the response isn’t automatic. So, at a basic level, the amygdala spots and reacts to short-term or simple risks and the neocortex analyses more complex, longer-term risks.

“Our brain is essentially a get-out-of-the-way machine.”

The problem with the neocortex is that it’s a fairly new piece of software in our brains and is still evolving. It’s actually not that great at measuring risks, particularly those where the impact on us is abstract or played out over a long time period.

Our amygdala, meanwhile, is a much more powerful engine that will spot and react to risks, often overpowering the more complex neocortex. The amygdala evolved to save our ancestors from genuine existential threats like dangerous animals and extreme conditions, risks that most of us don’t face in our modern lives. So now, instead of spotting complex but real threats, our brains are over-sensitive to perceived short-term threats.

The most striking example of this is climate change. We all know it’s happening and that it poses an existential threat to our entire species but we can’t muster the will to do much about it — because the outcomes and consequences are too far removed from our actions today. The same applies to the decisions we make about diet, health and career choices. To paraphrase Dan Gilbert, the problem with climate change isn’t that it’s happening too fast, it’s that it’s not happening fast enough.

Another reason we undervalue these risks is the lack of a human factor in them. There’s no person doing climate change to us — or at least not a small enough group of people for us to identify and focus our angst on. And our diet and career choices can’t be pinned on anyone other than ourselves so there’s no-one to externalise the risk on to there either.

The green peril.

Which brings us to coronavirus — its spread and impact are an excellent example of our skewed perception of risk. Here’s what we know about it so far:

• Outside China, it has a 1–2% mortality rate
• This makes it 10–20x worse than the flu in terms of lethality
• It has an infection rate (R-nought) of around 2.5 people for every infected person, compared to 1.3 for the flu, 2–3 for the common cold and 4–7 for mumps
• Around 80% of cases are mild, with many people unaware they have it.

So compared to other infections and diseases, coronavirus is definitely more severe and something the public at large need to take action on. With some simple behaviour changes (working from home, avoiding public gatherings, increased hygiene) these risk factors reduce a lot, but there’s little doubt that coronavirus is something we need to take seriously.

Does it justify the level of attention it’s getting from our risk-sensitive amygdalas though? Based on what we currently know, the epidemic will eventually pass and it’s likely a vaccine will be created within a year — it will, eventually, be something we remember in the same way as SARS.

Yet the newspapers and media are bursting full of reporting on this deadly pandemic, and we respond to this because of the ‘risk narrative’ we apply to it: it’s from other humans, it’s global and it could kill us tomorrow.

We apply a higher level of risk attention to events that have a human component — disease and terrorism being the two best examples. This is one of the reasons why we spend far less time worrying about climate change which is too nebulous to pinpoint on specific humans — you can’t really get agitated about Gary from Accounting and his impact on carbon emissions, but you will give him an evil look if he sneezes without covering his mouth.

Time is another factor. Our perception of time is distorted by the relatively brief time spans of our lives, something our brains measure in analogue rather than digital fashion. If the history of Earth was a single 24-hour day starting at midnight, humans would appear at about ninety-seconds before the following midnight. This scale of time is too much for us to comprehend because most people struggle to even think beyond the next few months, let alone beyond their own lifetimes — which is where climate change sits. Coronavirus, meanwhile, is here right now, infecting and killing people.

What do we spend our attention on?

The press and media know all of this of course. People who publish anything at scale are experts at understanding what will get our attention and coronavirus is an excellent story. It feeds into fears and themes that have been amplified by tabloids and Hollywood films for decades. It has us all looking at each other and wondering if they have it and tweaking our survival instincts to panic buy groceries.

The same human fear quality is true of terrorism. Because it’s perpetrated by other human beings, it seems much more shocking to our sensibilities, and much more immediate because we’re surrounded by people and, in theory, any one of them could murder us. It’s quite common for people to consider how close they were to the location of a terror attack and shudder, wondering if it could have been them. From a risk perspective though, all of this makes no sense at all. In the last 20 years, there have been 142 deaths in the UK as a result of terrorism equating to roughly 7 a year, compared to 29,000 deaths annually from air pollution, and 78,000 from smoking. Yet few people come into work and talk about close they were to car exhausts on the way into the office.

If risks to humanity were represented proportionately in the press, the first half of every newspaper would probably be given over to climate change, obesity, income inequality and air pollution. Every single day. Terrorism, meanwhile, would probably have a small column on page 36 next to reports on lightning strikes, dog attacks and why watching ‘Love Island’ is bad for you.

From distractions to actions.

What we should pay attention to, is often what we struggle with the most — things like our own health, the environment, our life choices and our relationships. These are all things with consequences that play over time but require small, regular actions from us now without any immediate reward.

It’s because of how removed these outcomes are from our actions today, that we undervalue more serious and real long-term risks. If you eat burgers and pizza every day, your health outcomes in later life are pretty much guaranteed to be worse, and you’re much more likely to die sooner — but that’s too far away to worry about. If you smoke regularly, you’re 25 times more likely to get cancer — but probably much later in life.

We can, however, train ourselves to take action now to reduce these risks over time. We all know the drill: regular exercise is good for your body and mind, a mostly plant-based diet is better for your physical health and the planet, finding work that matters to you is better for your psychological wellbeing, and so on. The trick is in reminding ourselves of these long-term risks through things like visioning and habit forming — both topics too big to cover in brief.

The point is to invest in a future state now, and ignore the short-term distractions around you. In the same way you save for retirement, you can invest now in how healthy you’ll be when you’re older, or how skilled you’ll be later in your career. Learning compounds over time which is why I like to think of reading as an investment in my future self.

‘You are what you eat’ is only a part of the story. You become a product of what you eat, what you read and listen to, who you spend time with and what you spend time doing. It just takes a while to pay off.

Back to the immediate threat.

The irony with coronavirus is that the greatest threat is probably the longer-term one that most people aren’t talking about right now: the impact on the economy. With most countries, including the UK, already teetering on recession, the outbreak will increase the risk of one and certainly have a huge impact globally. And economic downturns are a perfect example of outcomes too diffuse to understand: businesses will fail, jobs will be lost and incomes reduced, which always leads to a decrease in living standards, poor health, and an increase in deaths.

None of this is to say we shouldn’t take coronavirus seriously. Public health outbreaks like this require us to pay attention and change behaviours to limit the impact in the first instance. But in a years time, when coronavirus is remembered like bird flu and the Y2K bug, shouldn’t we also have a better day-to-day appreciation of the real risks all around us, the ones that require us to think in decades rather than days?

Thanks for reading ????

Sign up to my weekly newsletter for a short, curated selection of interesting articles, blogs and podcasts: https://www.getrevue.co/profile/jindy-mann

https://medium.com/@jindymann