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even genuine scientists are human and as such susceptible to the allure of offering up new paradigms (as the historian of science Thomas Kuhn put it)

paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould insisted that his conception of “punctuated equilibria” (a kind of Marxist biology that blurred the lines between evolution and revolution), which he developed along with fellow paleontologist Niles Eldredge, upended the traditional Darwinian understanding of how natural selection works.

This notion doesn’t constitute a fundamental departure from plain old evolution by natural selection; it simply italicizes that sometimes the process is comparatively rapid, other times slower.

In addition, they have long had a peculiar perspective on evolution, because of the limitations of the fossil record

Darwin was a pioneering geologist as well as the greatest of all biologists, and his insights were backgrounded by the key concept of uniformitarianism, as advocated by Charles Lyell, his friend and mentor

previously regnant paradigm among geologists had been “catastrophism

fossil record was therefore seen as reflecting the creation and extinction of new species by an array of dramatic and “unnatural” dei ex machina.

Of late, however, uniformitarianism has been on a losing streak. Catastrophism is back, with a bang . . . or a flood, or a burst of extraterrestrial radiation, or an onslaught of unpleasant, previously submerged chemicals

This emphasis on catastrophes is the first of a triad of novelties on which “A New History of Life” is based. The second involves an enhanced role for some common but insufficiently appreciated inorganic molecules, notably carbon dioxide, oxygen and hydrogen sulfide.

Life didn’t so much unfold smoothly over hundreds of millions of years as lurch chaotically in response to diverse crises and opportunities: too much oxygen, too little carbon dioxide, too little oxygen, too much carbon dioxide, too hot, too cold

So far, so good, except that in their eagerness to emphasize what is new and different, the authors teeter on the verge of the same trap as Gould: exaggerating the novelty of their own ideas.

Things begin to unravel when it comes to the third leg of Messrs. Ward and Kirschvink’s purported paradigmatic novelty: a supposed role for ecosystems—rain forests, deserts, rivers, coral reefs, deep-sea vents—as units of evolutionary change

“While the history of life may be populated by species,” they write, “it has been the evolution of ecosystems that has been the most influential factor in arriving at the modern-day assemblage of life. . . . [W]e know that on occasion in the deep past entirely new ecosystems appear, populated by new kinds of life.” True enough, but it is those “new kinds of life,” not whole ecosystems, upon which natural selection acts.

One of the most common popular misconceptions about evolution is that it proceeds “for the good of the species.”

The problem is that smaller, nimbler units are far more likely to reproduce differentially than are larger, clumsier, more heterogeneous ones. Insofar as ecosystems are consequential for evolution—and doubtless they are—it is because, like occasional catastrophes, they provide the immediate environment within which something not-so-new is acted out.

This is natural selection doing its same-old, same-old thing: acting by a statistically potent process of variation combined with selective retention and differential reproduction, a process that necessarily operates within the particular ecosystem that a given lineage occupies.

Despite his injuries, Turner began giving first aid and pulled other soldiers to safety. As he worked, he was shot twice — one bullet breaking a bone in his arm. Yet Turner would say later that he felt almost no pain.

"Soldiers in the heat of the moment don't recognize the pain that's happening," Linden says. But once that moment is over, those same soldiers may feel a lot of pain from something minor, like a hypodermic needle, he says.

CIA interrogators used both tactics after Sept. 11, according to a Senate report released late last year.

One system determines the pain's location, intensity and characteristics: stabbing, aching, burning, etc.

there is a completely separate system for the emotional aspect of pain

positive emotions — like feeling calm and safe and connected to others — can minimize pain. But negative emotions tend to have the opposite effect. Torturers have exploited that aspect for centuries.

they want to accentuate pain during torture they can do this with humiliation [or] with an unpredictable schedule of delivering pain

Those things will make the emotional component of the pain experience stronger."

brain also determines the emotion we attach to each painful experience, Linden says. That's possible, he explains, because the brain uses two different systems to process pain information coming from our nerve endings.

One thing scientists are still trying to understand is precisely how the brain regulates the perception of pain

The team studied low-frequency brain waves in a part of the brain that responds to sensations in the hand,

Earlier research had shown that these rhythms increase when the brain is blocking sensory information from the hand.

reseasrchers monitored the brain waves of a dozen people who were asked to pay attention only to their hand or only to their foot. During the experiment the scientists delivered a light tap to each person's finger or toe.

ocused on their feet, low-frequency rhythms increased in the brain area that responds to hand sensations — because participants were asking their brains to ignore sensory input from the hand, and it's these low-frequency rhythms that do the blocking of such information.

low-frequency rhythms also increased in a different brain area — the region that ignores distractions, the team discovered.

The two areas became synchronized

"There's coordination between the front part of the brain, which is the executive control region of the brain, and the sensory part of the brain, which is filtering information from the environment," she says.

suggests that at least some people can teach their brains how to filter out things like chronic pain, perhaps through meditation

It found that people who practiced mindfulness meditation for eight weeks greatly improved their control of the brain rhythms that block out pain.

First, campaigners have to present their case as a simple, compelling story that everyone can understand. This argument, like any political argument, won’t be won with data and graphs but with a narrative. It has to address our hearts, not our heads.

Next, the case for the climate has to be at least as much about remedy as diagnosis.

But that still leaves what may be the largest political challenge. Right now, climate change has become an issue of the left.

In the US, climate scepticism has become one of the defining traits of the right, a more reliable marker even than attitudes to abortion or gun control.

The most important of these loopholes is the fact that our brains are not set up to multi-task. Most of the time that is a good thing – it allows us to filter out all but the most important features of the world around us.

In fact, the key requirement for a successful pickpocket isn’t having nifty fingers, it’s having a working knowledge of the loopholes in our brains. Some are so good at it that researchers are working with them to get an insight into the way our minds work.

“A street thief will avoid like the plague people who are demonstrating a very open awareness of their environment. The man on the tube who is looking around, being very aware, they won’t go anywhere near,”

when faced with a change that has the potential to make us more likely to survive, some brains are able to adapt more easily than others.

Daniel Amen has studied over 63,000 brains using brain imaging to study blood flow and activity patterns.

One interesting conclusion of his studies is that a healthy brain is much better equipped to make positive changes and stick to them.

The discovery of brain plasticity has proven that you can help people change their brains almost immediately, by providing an environment to support learning

Even a few drinks a week can reduce overall brain function and create areas of reduced brain function.

brain learns better when it is healthy, adopting a healthier lifestyle can help learners develop brains that are more receptive to change and new ideas.

Prolonged exposure to high blood pressure not only restricts blood flow to the brain, but increase the risk of dementia, heart attack and stroke.

a physical pattern, in the form of neural connections, is formed in the brain. Every time we go over this pattern by revisiting this thought, we make the behavior stronger.

Brains with a high degree of new activity tend to stay that way. Brains that are slow to learn new things gradually lose some of their ability to change.

In our sleep-deprived world, the average adult is walking around in a brain-induced fog. The brain uses sleep to rebuild and reorganize. Sleep deprivation can result in lower brain performance and less ability to change.

Counter to previous beliefs, meditation has been shown to activate the cerebral cortex, which is the seat of conscious thought.

as Albert Einstein put it, “You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created.”

The brain-development lag has huge implications for how we think about anxiety and how we treat it. It suggests that anxious adolescents may not be very responsive to psychotherapy that attempts to teach them to be unafraid, like cognitive behavior therapy

should also make us think twice — and then some — about the ever rising use of stimulants in young people, because these drugs may worsen anxiety and make it harder for teenagers to do what they are developmentally supposed to do: learn to be unafraid when it is appropriate

up to 20 percent of adolescents in the United States experience a diagnosable anxiety disorder, like generalized anxiety or panic attacks, probably resulting from a mix of genetic factors and environmental influences.

This isn’t to say that cognitive therapy is ineffective for teenagers, but that because of their relative difficulty in learning to be unafraid, it may not be the most effective treatment when used on its own.

Fear learning lies at the heart of anxiety and anxiety disorders. This primitive form of learning allows us to form associations between events and specific cues and environments that may predict danger.

once previously threatening cues or situations become safe, we have to be able to re-evaluate them and suppress our learned fear associations. People with anxiety disorders have trouble doing this and experience persistent fear in the absence of threat — better known as anxiety.

Dr. Casey discovered that adolescents had a much harder time “unlearning” the link between the colored square and the noise than children or adults did.

adolescents had trouble learning that a cue that was previously linked to something aversive was now neutral and “safe.” If you consider that adolescence is a time of exploration when young people develop greater autonomy, an enhanced capacity for fear and a more tenacious memory for threatening situations are adaptive and would confer survival advantage. In fact, the developmental gap between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex that is described in humans has been found across mammalian species, suggesting that this is an evolutionary advantage.

As a psychiatrist, I’ve treated many adults with various anxiety disorders, nearly all of whom trace the origin of the problem to their teenage years. They typically report an uneventful childhood rudely interrupted by adolescent anxiety. For many, the anxiety was inexplicable and came out of nowhere.

prescription sales for stimulants increased more than fivefold between 2002 and 2012. This is of potential concern because it is well known from both human and animal studies that stimulants enhance learning and, in particular, fear conditioning.

“Soccer is a collective game, a team game, and everyone has to play the part which has been assigned to them, which means they have to understand it spatially, positionally and intelligently and make it effective.”

Then there is the structure of your network. There is by now a vast body of research on how differently people behave depending on the structure of the social networks. People with vast numbers of acquaintances have more job opportunities than people with fewer but deeper friendships

This influence happens through at least three avenues. First there is contagion. People absorb memes, ideas and behaviors from each other the way they catch a cold.

soccer is like a 90-minute anxiety dream — one of those frustrating dreams when you’re trying to get somewhere but something is always in the way. This is yet another way soccer is like life.

Let me simplify it with a classic observation: Each close friend you have brings out a version of yourself that you could not bring out on your own. When your close friend dies, you are not only losing the friend, you are losing the version of your personality that he or she elicited.

Once we acknowledge that, in life, we are playing soccer, not baseball, a few things become clear. First, awareness of the landscape of reality is the highest form of wisdom. It’s not raw computational power that matters most; it’s having a sensitive attunement to the widest environment,

Second, predictive models will be less useful. Baseball is wonderful for sabermetricians. In each at bat there is a limited range of possible outcomes. Activities like soccer are not as easily renderable statistically, because the relevant spatial structures are harder to quantify

Finally, there is the power of the extended mind. There is also a developed body of research on how much our very consciousness is shaped by the people around us.

Is life more like baseball, or is it more like soccer?

We get more of what we signal we want through our dollars, clicks and votes. If our politics are too often poisonous, it is because, as a society, we are demanding too much poison.

We should ask ourselves: What will my next click say about my desires? Will the next article about politics I read elevate me? Or will it be a pathogen that provides momentary satisfaction from an eloquent insult to my enemies, but ultimately fuels personal bitterness and increases the climate of acrimony in America?

what do we really demand of the politicians we support? Humility, optimism and flexibility? Or do we excuse our own side for its ideological rigidity, preening self-regard and blame-shifting?

The next two years are a challenge to our political leaders, yes — but also to us, to demand a climate of moral elevation as opposed to destruction of the other side.

the ubiquity of the Internet of Things is putting us squarely in the path of hackers, who will have almost unlimited portals into our digital lives.

Forbes reported that security researchers had come up with a $20 tool that was able to remotely control a car’s steering, brakes, acceleration, locks, and lights. It was an experiment that, again, showed how simple it is to manipulate and sabotage the smartest of machines, even though—but really because—a car is now, in the words of a Ford executive, a “cognitive device.”

a study of ten popular IoT devices by the computer company Hewlett-Packard uncovered a total of 250 security flaws among them. As Jerry Michalski, a former tech industry analyst and founder of the REX think tank, observed in a recent Pew study: “Most of the devices exposed on the internet will be vulnerable. They will also be prone to unintended consequences: they will do things nobody designed for beforehand, most of which will be undesirable.”

there’s no profit in leaving things as they are.Show me a body part, I’ll show you someone who’s making money by telling women that theirs looks wrong and they need to fix it. Tone it, work it out, tan it, bleach it, tattoo it, lipo it, remove all the hair, lose every bit of jiggle.

As a graphic designer and Photoshop teacher, I also have to note that Photoshop is used HEAVILY in these kinds of publications. Even on women with incredibly beautiful (by pop culture standards) bodies. It's quite sad because the imagery we're expected to live up to (or approximate) by cultural standards, is illustration. It's not even real. My boyfriend and I had a big laugh over a Playboy cover a few months ago where the Photoshopping was so extreme (thigh gap and butt cheek) it was anatomically impossible and looked ridiculous. I work in the industry.. I know what the Liquify filter and the Spot Healing Brush can do!

We may harp on gender inequality while pursuing stupid fetishes. Well into our middle age, we still try to forcefully wriggle into size 2 pair of jeans. We foolishly spend tonnes of money on fake ( these guys should be sued for false advertising )age -defying, anti-wrinkle creams. Why do we have to have our fuzz and bush diappear while the men have forests on their chests,abdomens,butts, arms and legs? For that we have only ourselves to blame. We just cannot get out of this mindset of being objectified. And we pass on these foolishness to our daughters and grand-daughters. They get trapped, never satisfied with what they see in the mirror. Don't expect the men to change anytime soon. They will always maintain the status quo. It is for us, women to get out of this rut. We have to 'snatch' gender-equality. It will never be handed to us. PERIOD

I spent years dieting and exercising to look good--or really to not look bad. I knew the calories (and probably still do) in thousands of foods. How I regret the time I spent on that and the boyfriends who cared about that. And how much more I had to give to the world. With unprecedented economic injustice, ecosystems collapsing, war breaking out everywhere, nations going under water, people starving in refugee camps, the keys to life, behavior, and disease being unlocked in the biological sciences . . . this is what we think women should spend their time worrying about? Talk about a poverty of ambition. No more. Won't even look at these demeaning magazines when I get my hair cut. If that's what a woman cares about, I try to tell her to stop wasting her time. If that's what a man cares about, he is a waste of my time. What a depressing way to distract women from achieving more in this world. Really wish I'd know this at 12.

we believe we're all competing against one another to procreate and participate in evolution. So women (and men) compete ferociously, and body image is a subset of all that. Then there's LeMarckian evolutionary theory and epigenetics...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamarckismhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EpigeneticsBottom line is that we can't stop this train any more easily than we can stop the anthropocene's Climate Change. Human beings are tempted. Sometimes we win the battle, other times we give in to vanity, hedonism, and ego. This is all a subset of much larger forces at play. Men and women make choices and act within that environment. Deal with it.

The authors were critical of studies of neonicotinoids on bee health that tested the insects’ ability to survive a single exposure to a given quantity of pesticide dust; they noted that the effect of the chemicals is cumulative and irreversible, meaning that repeated sublethal doses will eventually be deadly if a certain threshold is passed.

The restrictive approach used by European regulators contrasts with the more lenient stance of United States regulators. In March, American opponents of neonicotinoid use delivered more than four million signatures to the White House calling for stronger action to protect pollinators.

critics say the E.P.A.’s interim policy is rife with loopholes, allowing continued use of existing products for approved applications, for example. They also criticized the agency for not halting the approval of some products that are chemically quite similar to neonicotinoids but classified differently for regulatory purposes.

Pollination — the transfer of pollen from one flower to another, typically by wind, bug or bird — is essential to the global food supply. An estimated 75 percent of all traded crops, including apples, soybeans and corn, depend on pollination.

Neonicotinoids are absorbed by a plant so that the neurotoxic poison spreads throughout its tissues, including the sap, nectar and pollen. Far more deadly to insects than to mammals, they do not discriminate between harmful pests and beneficial pollinators.

Indeed, speakers of geographic languages seem to have an almost-superhuman sense of orientation.

The convention of communicating with geographic coordinates compels speakers from the youngest age to pay attention to the clues from the physical environment (the position of the sun, wind and so on) every second of their lives, and to develop an accurate memory of their own changing orientations at any given moment. So everyday communication in a geographic language provides the most intense imaginable drilling in geographic orientation

The Common Core promotes 10 so-called "College and Career Readiness Anchor Standards" for reading that emphasize technical skills like analyzing, integrating, and delineating a text. But these expectations deal very little with ensuring students are actually appreciating the literature at hand—and say nothing about the personal engagement and life lessons to which my principal was referring

Kate Kinsella, an influential author who consults school districts across the country and is considered "a guiding force on the National Advisory Board for the Consortium on Reading Excellence," recently told me to "ditch literature" since "literary fiction is not critical to college success." Kinsella continued, "What’s represented by the standards is the need to analyze texts rather than respond to literature.

As a teacher working within this regimented environment, my classroom objectives have had to shift. I used to feel deeply satisfied facilitating a rich classroom discussion on a Shakespearean play; now, I feel proud when my students explicitly acknowledge the aforementioned "anchor standards" and take the initiative to learn these technical skills.

But as a man who used to be a high school student interested in pursuing wisdom, I’m almost startled to find myself up late at night, literally studying these anchor standards instead of Hamlet itself.

It just feels like a very slow, gradual cultural shift that I don’t even notice except for sudden moments of nostalgia, like remembering a dream out of nowhere

I get it: My job is to teach communication, not values, and maybe that’s reasonable. After all, I’m not sure I would want my daughter gaining her wisdom from a randomly selected high-school teacher just because he passed a few writing and literature courses at a state university (which is what I did). My job description has evolved, and I’m fine with that

This arrangement, in theory, allows students to read the literature on their own, when they get their own time—and I’m fine with that. But then, where are they getting the time and space to appreciate the deeper lessons of classic literature, to evaluate its truth and appropriately apply it to their own lives?

research suggests that a significant majority of teens do not attend church, and youth church attendance has been decreasing over the past few decades. This is fine with me. But then again, where are they getting their wisdom?

I’m not talking about my child, or your child. I’m absolutely positive that my daughter will know the difference between Darcy and Wickham before she’s in eighth grade; and it's likely that people who would gravitate toward this story would appreciate this kind of thinking

I’m talking about American children in general—kids whose parents work all day, whose fathers left them or whose mothers died

even for the parents who do prioritize the humanities in their households, I’m not sure that one generation is actually sharing culturally relevant wisdom with the next one—not if the general community doesn’t even talk about what that wisdom specifically means. Each family can be responsible for teaching wisdom in their own way, and I’m fine with that. But then, does the idea of cultural wisdom get surrendered in the process?

Secular wisdom in the public schools seems like it should inherently spring from the literature that’s shaped American culture. And while the students focus on how Whitman’s "purpose shapes the content and style of his text," they’re obviously exposed to the words that describe his leaves of grass.

But there is a noticeable deprioritization of literature, and a crumbling consensus regarding the nation’s idea of classic literature. The Common Core requires only Shakespeare, which is puzzling if only for its singularity

The country’s disregard for the institutional transfer of cultural wisdom is evident with this single observation: None of the state assessments has a single question about the content of any classic literature. They only test on reading skills

But where are the students getting their wisdom?

Admittedly, nothing about the Common Core or any modern shifts in teaching philosophies is forbidding me from sharing deeper lessons found in Plato’s cave or Orwell’s Airstrip One. The fine print of the Common-Core guidelines even mentions a few possible titles. But this comes with constant and pervasive language that favors objective analysis over personal engagement.

Later, a kid who reminds me of the teenager I was in high school—a boy who is at different times depressed, excited, naive, and curious—asked me why I became an English teacher. I smiled in self-defense, but I was silent again, not knowing what to say anymore.

At the same time, the rise in protective committees and procedures (like trigger warnings) ensure that students will not be confronted with course materials that might upset them (even classics like Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” and “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”).

universities like Yale have given in to the implicit notion that they should provide the equivalent of the home environment.

But college is a different kind of community than a family, and its primary job is education of the student and adaptation to independent community living.

To prepare for increased autonomy and responsibility, college needs to be a time of exploration and experimentation. This process entails “trying on” new ways of thinking about oneself both intellectually and personally, which is possible only if a certain degree of freedom is allowed.

While we should provide “safe spaces” within colleges for marginalized groups, we must also make it safe for all community members to express opinions and challenge majority views. Intellectual growth and flexibility are fostered by rigorous debate and questioning.

It is not surprising that young people are prone to lash out, particularly when there are sociologic reasons to do so. Our generation rallied around clear issues: the war in Vietnam and governmentally sanctioned discrimination based on race and gender. ISIS, Newtown, a changing economy with fewer good jobs and stable career paths create anxiety without generating a unifying moral vision

The encroachment of behavioral guidelines into the social and even intellectual spheres comes at a cost. Every college discussion about community values, social climate and behavior should also include recognition of the developmental importance of student autonomy and self-regulation, of the necessary tension between safety and self-discovery.

Brooding, which is known among cognitive scientists as morbid rumination, is a mental state familiar to most of us, in which we can’t seem to stop chewing over the ways in which things are wrong with ourselves and our lives. This broken-record fretting is not healthy or helpful. It can be a precursor to depression and is disproportionately common among city dwellers compared with people living outside urban areas, studies show.

such rumination also is strongly associated with increased activity in a portion of the brain known as the subgenual prefrontal cortex.

gathered 38 healthy, adult city dwellers and asked them to complete a questionnaire to determine their normal level of morbid rumination. The researchers also checked for brain activity in each volunteer’s subgenual prefrontal cortex, using scans that track blood flow through the brain. Greater blood flow to parts of the brain usually signals more activity in those areas.

walking along the highway had not soothed people’s minds. Blood flow to their subgenual prefrontal cortex was still high and their broodiness scores were unchanged. But the volunteers who had strolled along the quiet, tree-lined paths showed slight but meaningful improvements in their mental health, according to their scores on the questionnaire. They were not dwelling on the negative aspects of their lives as much as they had been before the walk. They also had less blood flow to the subgenual prefrontal cortex. That portion of their brains were quieter.

many questions remain, he said, including how much time in nature is sufficient or ideal for our mental health, as well as what aspects of the natural world are most soothing. Is it the greenery, quiet, sunniness, loamy smells, all of those, or something else that lifts our moods?

“We’re not busy … we’re productive,” he wrote. “And yes, there’s a difference.”

“Busy paints a picture of people who are either keeping themselves occupied or who don’t have the time to do other things,” Spurlock explained. “Productive describes an environment rich with goals, personal and professional achievements and wrapped in success, a place where you're actually creating something vs just doing something.”

“Personal productivity… is the most important one, as it centres around the time that I make to spend with my family, my friends and doing things that fulfil me as a living person,”

Financial productivity is an important one, as these are the projects that create consistent revenue

“Being busy has somehow become a badge of honor. The prevailing notion is that if you aren’t super busy, you aren’t important or hard working,”

busyness makes you less productive

“When we think of a super busy person, we think of a ringing phone, a flood of emails and a schedule that’s bursting at the seams with major projects and side-projects hitting simultaneously,” he wrote. “Such a situation inevitably leads to multi-tasking and interruptions, which are both deadly to productivity.”

As Socrates said: Beware the barrenness of a busy life.

switching what you’re doing mid-task increases the time it takes you to finish both tasks by 25%

people an average of 15 minutes to return to their important projects… every time they were interrupted by e-mails, phone calls, or other messages

“We’re so enamored with multitasking that we think we’re getting more done, even though our brains aren’t physically capable of this,”

most productive when we manage our schedules enough to ensure that we can focus effectively on the task at hand

people use busyiness to “hide from… laziness and fear of failure”

People who took their time got selected out,

hypersensitive agency-detecting device, or HADD,

facilitated the rapid decision-making process that humans had to go through when they heard a rustling in the grass. (Lions act of their own accord. Better run.)

HADD may have planted the seeds for religious thought.

humans started attributing agency to things that really didn't have agency at all.

tendency to explain the natural world through the existence of beings with supernatural powers — things like gods, ancestral spirits, goblins and fairies — formed the basis for religious beliefs, according to many cognitive scientists.

They started attributing meaning to the actions of things that weren't really acting of their own accord.

they started anticipating what other beings' actions might be and planning their own actions accordingly.

"You might think that raindrops aren't agents," Clark said. "They can't act of their own accord. They just fall.

enabled them to discern other people's positive and negative intentions

thereby increasing their own chances of survival.

attributing purpose to the actions of nonactors, like raindrops, ToM took a turn toward the supernatural.

Theory of Mind

refer to HADD and ToM as the "god faculty,"

human beings haven't evolved past this way of thinking and making decisions,

"You can be educated out of some of these beliefs, but you can't be educated out of these cognitive faculties. We all have a hyperactive agency-detecting device. We all have a theory of mind."

a trait that stuck around because the people who possessed it were better able to survive and pass on their genes.

Religion may have naturally sprung up from this need to keep everybody on the same page,

Humans' predisposition to attribute intention to just about everything (e.g., volcanic eruptions, lunar eclipses, thunderstorms) isn't necessarily the reason religion came about,

How big do the numbers have to be for insensitivity to begin? Not very, it turns out.

The image of Aylan lying face down on the beach captivated the world’s attention and even, in short order, resulted in refugee policy changes in countries as far away as the United States. But 14 Syrian children drowned in the Aegean Sea the next day. Did you notice? Did you care?

demonstrated that “compassion fade” can occur when an incident involving a single person expands to as few as two people

In addition to psychic numbing, there is another psychological disposition at work, called “pseudoinefficacy.”

We found that people might be inclined to send money to an individual person in need, but that if they heard that a second person also required aid but could not be helped, they were less inclined to donate to the first person. Meeting that need no longer felt as satisfying. Similarly, when the need for assistance was described as part of a large-scale relief effort, potential donors would experience a demotivating sense of inefficacy arising from the thought that the help they could provide was but “a drop in the bucket.”

It seems that we are psychologically wired to help only one person at a time. And we don’t even care to do that if we sense that there are others we cannot help.

In addition, we believe that yet another psychological tendency, the “prominence effect,” explains why genuinely well-meaning people (and their governments) so often fail to intervene to prevent genocides and other large-scale abuses. “Prominent” actions or objectives are those that are easily justified, though they may not match our stated social values.

Decisions that protect national security or satisfy our attachment to near-term comforts and conveniences are easily justified. Such choices, as Paul Slovic explains in a recent University of Illinois Law Review article, are likely to trump decisions to protect people or the environment, especially when the humans in need or the environmental phenomena in jeopardy (species, habitats, the planet’s climate) are so vast in scale as to seem distant and abstract.

argued decades ago, in their book “New World New Mind,” that our minds had failed to keep up with the times — that we were, in a sense, cave men and cave women, struggling to deal with modern problems, like nuclear annihilation, to which our minds were not suited. They called for a “conscious evolution” in how we processed information about the modern world, meaning an intentional change in our cognitive habits.

We need to be alert to how psychic numbing, pseudoinefficacy and the prominence effect lead us to act in ways contrary to our values. Doing so can help us to improve our reactions to information about a complex and often upsetting world