Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer

by Barbara Ehrenreich

According to the latest from the field of cognitive science, humans have an innate tendency to see agency, whether in the form of gods or spirits, where it does not exist because there was once a survival advantage in doing so. A prehistoric person or hominid would be wise to imagine that every stirring in the tall grass meant that a leopard—or some such potentially hazardous life form—was closing in for an attack. If you decide the stirring is a leopard, you can run away, and if you were wrong, nothing is lost except perhaps some temporary peace of mind. But if you decide that it is just a breeze and it turns out to be a leopard, you become a leopard’s lunch. So our brains evolved to favor the scarier alternative and the choice of running. We have become what the cognitive scientists call “hyperactive agency detection devices”: We see faces in clouds, hear denunciations in thunder, and sense conscious beings all around us even when there is nothing there.