Your Brain, On News

Stop what you’re doing right now and look around for five seconds.

What did you see? Maybe the interior of your home, your friends, your family, nature, a cityscape, your workplace, the inside of the bathroom stall you’re currently occupying. Was any of it on fire? No? How about collapsing, dying, or exploding? Oh, no again?

Ahhh, but wait — some of you did see those things. Those of you whose televisions are tuned into the news in the background did see the despair, destruction, and dystopian dereliction. This is because what we have come to call “news” is merely a chronicle of the abnormal — oddities that are so out the ordinary they seem worth reporting.

Let’s think about the collection of all experiences of all world citizens over the last hour. Now, let’s plot all those experiences along a histogram that runs from 0 to 10. Let that spectrum represent banality, or the normalcy of the experiences; zero represents extremely negative experiences, and 10 represents extremely positive experiences.

After plotting all those experiences, we’d end up with something that looked pretty much like the bell curve above. The vast majority of experiences would be pretty much…