Harvard University Nieman reports (Summer 2010 Issue) -2

JUNE 15 POST CONTINUED....

Feeling the Heat: The Brain Holds Clues for Journalism

Emotional Heat 

My struggle with this question led me to the science of how the brain processes information, especially the way emotion directs attention. Of course, it did not take the rise of modern neuroscience to prove that emotion holds an audience. Sophocles knew that when he wrote his drama of incest and violence, “Oedipus Rex.” So do the editors of supermarket tabloids. Count on fear and sex to attract the eye.

Evolution provides the reason: Our ancestors became our ancestors by being able to spot danger and the opportunity to mate. So it was inevitable that as competition for attention exploded with the revolutionary information technologies of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, message senders raised the emotional volume. Serious journalists tended to decry this as infotainment or worse. Perhaps they never themselves quite lived up to the professional ideal of utter disinterest and detachment, but they did learn to draw back from raw emotional appeals.

The audience did not. This baffled many of us. How could people be taken in by screaming commentators (on everything from health care to basketball), by celebrity gossip, by reports characterized at best by truthiness rather than the rigors of verification? 

Here is where the implications of the rapidly developing science of the mind help. It turns out that certain kinds of cognitive challenges (challenges to our thinking) produce emotional arousal. And an emotionally aroused brain is drawn to things that are emotionally charged. 

Give normal humans a tricky anagram or a long division problem involving two numbers out to six decimal points, and they will begin to show emotional arousal—think of it as stress. Give them a strict time limit, and their level of arousal will rise. Throw new information at them (some of it useful, some irrelevant, some just wrong) while they are working on the problem, and their emotional temperature will go up even more. Then distract them (say by calling their names or having their smartphones signal that somebody is trying to reach them), and their arousal level will soar. 

If that sounds familiar, it is. All too familiar. Information overload, time pressure, and distraction characterize our era. The very nature of the information environment in which we all live creates emotional arousal. We are available every moment to everyone we know, and an enormous number of people we do not know. We continuously receive messages: messages of a particular sort—the kind that are directed specifically to us. They come from people who know us personally or from people or institutions that have learned something about what interests us. 

In effect, these ubiquitous messages call out our names. Consequently we live in a continuous state of interruption and distraction. Time pressure is enormous. Even after leaving the Tribune Company to write books, I discovered that people expected me to respond to e-mails within a couple of hours, if not a couple of minutes, and were offended if I did not. 

So not only has the explosion of competition among suppliers of information—news, advertising and entertainment—caused producers to increase the emotional temperature, the recipients of information have become more attracted to emotional heat. This helps explain why heavy news seekers turn to the intensity of Fox News or MSNBC and away from CNN. (It also explains why the once rather restrained National Geographic channel has so many shows about predator species that prey on humans—species that include Homo sapiens themselves.) 


CONT>>>