The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and Save Our Lives

by Shankar Vedantam

  I asked Michele Shinnick what she made of John Violanti’s research and his idea that cops should check their guns at the station when they left work. She was silent for a long moment. Then she said she doubted it would work. Ed Shinnick knew and loved guns; he owned five weapons. He owned his own service revolver. If departments were to take away the guns of police officers when they left work, Michele Shinnick said, cops would buy weapons for their personal protection.

  “Do I wish he did not have a gun?” she asked. “Sure, but I think if he was determined, he would have done it anyway.”

  The empirical research into suicide, however, calls into question the intuitively popular notion that people who are intent on suicide will always find ways to kill themselves. The statistics speak for themselves. About four hundred thousand people attempt suicide each year in the United States. The vast majority of those who survive do not go on to kill themselves. Suicide is primarily an act of impulse, which is why the suicide rate in Washington, D.C., fell by a quarter when people were restrained from owning handguns. The impulse to end your life rarely spans months and years. It usually lasts hours, maybe a day or two, a week at most. Within that narrow window, people with lethal means at their disposal are at far higher risk than people who lack the “vector” of destruction. Ed Shinnick was a great example of a stable, responsible, highly trained gun owner. All the weapons in his home were locked, and the guns were always placed in a safe that was also locked. He never drank. He was an upstanding, religious family man. Guns made Ed Shinnick feel safe. He was ready to confront any assassin—except the one in the mirror.

  This chapter has focused so far on the subject of risk, which is all about small numbers. Our inability to intuitively tell the difference between something that has a one in a thousand chance of occurring and something that has a one in two thousand chance of occurring explains why we make errors in thinking about homicide and suicide. Both risks are rare—they involve tiny numbers. The difference between them is abstract: We do not feel it in our gut. The risk for suicide is twice as large as the risk for homicide in the United States, but it doesn’t feel that way. Homicide scares us, and suicide does not, because in the absence of being able to grasp a concrete difference between a one in a thousand risk and a one in two thousand risk, we fall back on our hidden brains to do our thinking for us.

  Our unconscious minds are exquisitely tuned to the unexpected, violent attack. We are always on the lookout for strange and exotic threats. In our evolutionary history, this made sense. If a new predator arrived on the scene, or an old predator suddenly came up with a clever new ambush, it required only a single example of the new threat to reshape our behavior. Our brains were designed in the crucible of a violent past, where the greatest threats to our ancestors came from predators, injuries, and traps. This might be why we all have primal fears. The creak on the stair in the middle of the night, the airplane crash, the psychopath loose on the streets. There might well be deep evolutionary reasons for these fears; it made sense, millennia ago, to fear situations where we had no control and situations that involved malevolent attackers.

  In our modern world, however, the things we really ought to fear are almost entirely of our own doing. Failing to climb the stairs and get enough exercise kills far more people than any number of murderers climbing those stairs. You are at far greater risk of taking your own life than being killed by a terrorist. If you were to go strictly by the numbers, that cigarette in your hand ought to have you screaming louder than a chance encounter with Hannibal Lecter. But we don’t go by the numbers, because we are not very good at thinking about the relative sizes of small numbers. Our unconscious minds fall back on intuitions that bias us into fearing the kind of risks that posed the greatest danger to our ancestors—violent, external threats. This may be why terrorism, homicide, and airplane crashes scare us more than heart disease, suicide, and lung cancer.

  Unconscious biases in the hidden brain explain why we fear things that are unlikely and why we are blasé about things that can do us harm. I know this firsthand. My very first front-page article as a journalist was about the risks of riding motorcycles without helmets. I have close relatives who have died in traffic accidents. Eight years after that first article, I went on a road trip in India with some friends. On a motorcycle. Without a helmet. If you ask me why I did it, I will give you the same answers as thousands of people who do stupid things every day: I don’t know. The risk seemed small. All my friends were riding on bikes without helmets. I thought I was a skilled rider. There are an infinite number of ways to rationalize unconscious bias.

  As I was leaning into a turn at about forty miles an hour, a patch of gravel came up suddenly. I knew I was in trouble. Time slowed down. I skidded. I will never forget the awful feeling of traveling sideways, my wheels gliding beneath me like skates. I can feel it now. And then, in a moment, it was over. The wheels found traction, I pulled out of the skid, and it was as if nothing had happened.

  The dumb algorithms in our hidden brain are not programmed to trigger panic when it comes to the risks we pose ourselves, which is why I didn’t feel paralyzing fear when I chose to ride a motorbike without a helmet, and why millions of gun owners feel safer with loaded guns on their nightstands. Unconscious bias explains why so many of our fears—and national policies—are completely detached from reality. Two years after the September 11 terrorist attacks, a research study found that if Americans who thought they would be personally killed by terrorism were actually killed by terrorists, there would have to be the equivalent of a September 11-scale attack every single day in the United States. Americans did not misperceive the risk of terrorism because they enjoyed scaring themselves. No, the hidden brain biased us into paying exaggerated attention to terrorism because the hidden brain is programmed to be disproportionately vigilant to threats that are new, terrifying, and malevolent. We have carried our Stone Age brain into the Internet Age. It is Stone Age thinking that prompts us to spend so much of our national budget fighting terrorism and so little on the everyday diseases and threats that kill many, many more Americans—and that are certain to kill many, many more Americans in the years to come.

  Small numbers aren’t the only challenge that the brain finds difficult to handle. We are not very good with large numbers, either. This, too, has extraordinary consequences—in the realm of moral judgment.

  The Insiko 1907 was a tramp tanker that roamed the Pacific Ocean. Its twelve-man Taiwanese crew hunted the seas for fishing fleets in need of fuel; the Insiko had a cargo of tens of thousands of gallons of diesel. It was supposed to be an Indonesian ship, except that it was not registered in Indonesia because its owner, who lived in China, did not bother with taxes. In terms of international law, the Insiko 1907 was stateless, a two-hundred-sixty-foot microscopic speck on the largest ocean on earth. On March 13, 2002, a fire broke out in the Insiko’s engine room. It killed a crew member and singed the ship’s chief engineer. The fire spread quickly, and set aflame some oil in the bilge. The fire moved so fast that crew members did not have time to radio for help. Eleven survivors and the captain’s puppy, who was along for the voyage, retreated to the tanker’s forecastle. They dragged supplies of food and water with them. From their perch, they watched the fire burn for twenty days and twenty nights. The ship was about eight hundred miles south of Hawaii’s Big Island, and adrift. Its crew could not call on anyone for help, and no one who could help knew of the Insiko’s existence, let alone its problems.

  Drawn by wind and currents, the Insiko eventually got within two hundred twenty miles of Hawaii, where it was spotted by a cruise ship called the Norwegian Star on April 2. The cruise ship diverted course, rescued the Taiwanese crew, and radioed the United States Coast Guard. But as the Norwegian Star pulled away from the Insiko and steamed toward Hawaii, a few passengers on the cruise ship heard the sound of barking. The captain’s puppy had been left behind on the tanker.

  It is not entirely clear why the cruise ship did not r
escue the Jack Russell mixed terrier, or why the Taiwanese crew did not insist on it. Some accounts suggest that cruise ship officers refused to take the dog because they were concerned they would run afoul of Hawaii’s strict animal quarantine laws, and the Taiwanese captain, who had just been through a terrible ordeal, did not put his foot down. There may have been communication problems.

  Whatever the reason, the burned-out tanker and its lonely inhabitant were abandoned on the terrible immensity of the Pacific. The Norwegian Star made a stop at Maui. A passenger who heard the barking dog called the Hawaiian Humane Society in Honolulu. The animal welfare group routinely rescued abandoned animals—675 animals were rescued the previous year—but recovering a dog on a tanker adrift in the Pacific was something new.

  Pamela Burns, president of the Hawaiian Humane Society, was in Florida when she got a call about the dog. She decided the society should look into a rescue. The U.S. Coast Guard said it could not use taxpayer dollars to save the dog; the tanker was in international waters and outside the purview of the United States government. Officials told the Humane Society that rescuing the dog might cost anywhere from sixty to eighty thousand dollars. The Chinese owner of the Insiko was not planning to recover the ship, let alone the dog. The Humane Society alerted fishing boats about the lost tanker. Media reports began appearing about the terrier, whose name was Hokget.

  Something about a lost puppy on an abandoned ship on the Pacific gripped people’s imaginations. Money poured into the Humane Society to fund a rescue. One check was for five thousand dollars. People got in touch from as far away as New York and even England. In the end, donations came from thirty-nine states, the District of Columbia, and four foreign countries.

  “It was just about a dog,” Burns told me. “It was a fabulous example of [how] they are our best friend and they deserve good. This was an opportunity for people to feel good about rescuing a dog. People poured out their support. A handful of people were incensed. These people said, ‘You should be giving money to the homeless.’”

  But Burns felt the great thing about America was that people were free to give money to whatever cause they cared about, and people cared about Hokget.

  The problem with a rescue was that no one knew where the Insiko was. The coast guard estimated it could be anywhere in an area measuring 360,000 square miles. The Humane Society paid forty-eight thousand dollars to a private company called American Marine Corporation to look for the Insiko. Two Humane Society officers boarded a salvage tugboat, the American Quest, and set off into the Pacific.

  Air, sea, and high-tech surveillance equipment were all pressed into service. With each passing day, the calls from around the world intensified: Had Hokget been found? In six-hour shifts, Humane Society officers and the tugboat crew studied radar screens, hoping to get a glimpse of the tanker. Pressure was mounting on U.S. officials to do something. Under the guise of exercises, the U.S. Navy began quietly hunting for the Insiko—the tramp tanker was deemed a search target for a maintenance and training mission.

  By April 7, the expensive search had turned up nothing. The Insiko had either sunk or drifted outside the coast guard’s search box. The letters and checks continued to pour in.

  “This check is in memory of the little dog lost at sea.”

  “Thank you for pulling my heartstrings and for reminding me of all the hope there is left in this world.”

  “This story is also great for the children. They learn to respect life.”

  On April 9, a window of hope opened. A Japanese fishing boat, the Victoria City, told the coast guard it had seen something that looked like the Insiko. The coast guard relayed the message to the Humane Society, which got word out to fishing fleets in the area to keep an eye out for the tanker. The Insiko had drifted far outside the coast guard’s projections. It was still in international waters, but far to the west of the search box where rescuers had been hunting. The Insiko seemed roughly headed in the direction of Johnston Atoll, an unincorporated and uninhabited U.S. territory—and the coast guard finally decided this was a good enough reason to intervene. The coast guard dispatched a C-130 aircraft with a high-tech forward-looking radar. After searching another fifty thousand square miles of ocean, the coast guard found the Insiko. A photo taken with a telephoto lens showed a brown and white blur running across the deck of the tanker—Hokget was still alive. The C-130 was not equipped for a rescue, so the crew dropped their own lunches onto the tanker for the dog—pizza, granola bars, and oranges. Media interest in the terrier surged. The captain of the Insiko declared he would love to have his dog back; he said he had picked her up in Indonesia and named her after the Mandarin word for “fortune.”

  Two fishing vessels eventually reached the Insiko. For two days, fishermen tried to rescue the dog. The puppy took one look at them and fled below-decks in the direction of the engine room. The rescuers tried to tempt the terrier with peanut butter. They called out in multiple languages. It wasn’t possible to chase Hokget into the engine room. The fire had rendered much of the Insiko dangerous—it was still carrying thousands of gallons of fuel, and no one knew the extent of the damage. The fishermen eventually gave up and let the Insiko go its aimless way.

  Rusty Nall, vice president of American Marine Corporation, the private company contracted by the Humane Society to rescue Hokget, was in regular touch with coast guard officials and fishing fleets. When he heard the dog had not been seen after it ran below-decks, his heart sank. The engine room had a ten-foot drop. Had Hokget been inadvertently injured or killed? Would the long vigil turn out to be futile? Nall felt like giving up, except that when he went home each night, his nine-year-old daughter, Morgan, would ask, “Did you find the doggie, Daddy?” Nall would come back to work the next day and press on.

  There was talk of dispatching the U.S. Navy to sink the Insiko as a way of ensuring that any release of hazardous materials would occur hundreds of miles from shore. This, of course, would kill the dog—assuming it was still alive. Facing intense public pressure to save Hokget, government officials concluded that asking the U.S. Navy to sink the tanker—750 miles from Hawaii, nearly 2,500 miles from the U.S. mainland, and drifting away from the United States—posed unacceptable environmental risks. The coast guard decided to access U.S. taxpayer funds to recover the Insiko. It wasn’t officially called an animal rescue effort. The rescue was authorized under the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund, based on the argument that if the aimless Insiko somehow managed to follow a westward course for 250 straight miles, it might run aground on Johnston Atoll and harm marine life.

  ——

  The environmental concern was a lovely touch, given that the United States used Johnston Atoll for a good part of the twentieth century as a nuclear weapons test site and a dumping ground for chemical weapons from various wars. Nerve agents, blister agents, sarin, and plutonium contamination were Johnston Atoll’s environmental legacy, but diesel was deemed too deadly.

  The American Quest tugboat was called up again—this time funded by taxpayers—to rescue Hokget and bring the Insiko back to Honolulu.

  Throughout the drama of the previous weeks, the Humane Society had called the dog Forgea, because it had been told the Mandarin name for the dog was “For-gay.” That was the name that the fishermen had used when they’d tried to lure the dog with peanut butter. Now the Humane Society learned the dog’s name was actually Hokget, according to the correct pronunciation in the dialect Hokkien, the language of the tanker’s captain. Armed with this new information and a dog trap, the American Quest set off. In case the terrier did not come voluntarily, the rescuers also took along treats and a ham bone.

  On April 26, nearly one and a half months after the puppy’s ordeal began, the American Quest found the Insiko and boarded the tanker. The forty-pound female pup was still alive, and hiding in a pile of tires. It was a hot day, so Brian Murray, the American Quest’s salvage supervisor, went in and simply grabbed the terrier by the scruff of her neck. The puppy was terrified and
shook for two hours. Her rescuers fed her, bathed her, and applied lotion to her nose, which was sunburned.

  Hokget arrived in Honolulu on May 2 (with the Insiko hauled in tow so her diesel could be salvaged) and was greeted by crowds of spectators, a press conference, banners welcoming her to America, and a pretty red Hawaiian lei. A local radio station played “Who Let the Dogs Out?” The local, national, and international media were all in prominent attendance. After serving a period in quarantine, Hokget was adopted by the family of Michael Kuo of Honolulu. She put on weight and was signed up for dog classes.

  ——

  The story of Hokget’s rescue is comical, but it is also touching. Human beings from around the world came together to save a dog. The vast majority of people who sent money to the Humane Society knew they would never personally see Hokget, never have their hands licked in gratitude. Saving the dog, as Pamela Burns suggested to me, was an act of pure altruism, and a marker of the remarkable capacity human beings have to empathize with the plight of others.

  There are a series of disturbing questions, however. Eight years before Hokget was rescued, the same world that showed extraordinary compassion in the rescue of a dog sat on its hands as a million human beings were killed in Rwanda. Shortly after the dog rescue, as a genocide in Darfur unfolded with terrible accounts of mass rape and murder, ABC News devoted eighteen minutes over the entire course of 2004 to tell Americans in nightly newscasts what was happening. ABC, by the way, led the way among the major networks. NBC devoted five minutes and CBS three minutes in 2004 to Darfur.

  The twentieth century reveals a shockingly long list of similar horrors that have been ignored by the world as they unfolded: two million Armenians in 1915, six million Jews in the Holocaust. John Prendergast of the Enough project, an advocacy group committed to ending genocide, told me that more than five million people have died as a result of war, famine, and disease in the Congo over the past decade. Why have successive generations of Americans—a people with extraordinary powers of compassion—done so little to halt suffering on such a large scale? Why have successive American presidents placed genocide so low on their list of priorities? It isn’t because of a lack of awareness. When President George W. Bush was sworn into office in January 2001, the first words he heard as president were about an unfolding crisis in southern Sudan, where more than two million people eventually died. The Reverend Franklin Graham, who was leading a prayer at the Bush inauguration, whispered, “Mr. President, I hope you do something about southern Sudan.”