Boston and the Brain, by Nancy Chek

My first thought was “Wha--?” My second was “terrorists?” My third thought was “Someone who resents high performers?” None of these thoughts required any work on my part. I did not cogitate, analyze, weigh or seek additional information. The thoughts arrived unbidden. I need to remember that.

I need to remember that because my brain, like all human brains, attend to the drama—the outrageous, the loud, the flashy, the emotionally compelling—and, in so doing, either miss some critical, quiet clue or put undue weight on the Big Events. For instance, many more people die of poor diet (too much salt, fat, sugar) than terrorist attacks, but I pay much more attention to screaming headlines than to what I put in my body.

Actually, I do pay attention to Cheese Crunchies—a lot of attention—so it would be more accurate to say that I let drama convince me that there are Bigger Things at Stake than the effects on my body of Crunchies and too few vegetables, statistics and the relatively quiet warnings of nutritionists to the contrary. I am way more likely to die of clogged-up arteries than a bomb. Way more.

Good investigators manage to hold that drama-craving part of their thinking at bay, and that will be the job in Boston: setting aside emotion and automatic thoughts and attending to the facts, even the small ones.  I am not on the investigating team, but I have plenty of opportunities to practice in ordinary life. When John insists he didn’t get my three e-mails, I can stop a moment to remember that my first impulse (to wield the “fist of death” a la Alice in Dilbert cartoons) is probably not my best and instead attend to investigating what happened really instead of getting hooked by the drama of John’s bluster (which “obviously” means he’s a lying sack of cockroaches).