by Leigh Sales
‘If having MS prepared you for being injured in a hostage situation, I’m really scared to imagine what the Lindt siege is preparing you for,’ I put to her. ‘How do you wrap your head around the randomness of things? I know you believe in God but the future is so unknown.’
‘This is the thing. We live in a myth that it’s not. We live imagining that there are certainties. That’s just this big, collective lie that we live in. We’re so caught up in the state of our Western culture – we can make this happen, we can affect that, we can do this, we can do that. We can create our safe world. Then along comes some nasty terrorist and blows it up. It’s a collective delusion.’ Louisa pauses. ‘I don’t say this too loudly because most people can’t handle me saying it, but it’s like a gift to be reminded that life can change, that we’re not in control. To have that shockingly ripped from you, it is a gift. You go, Right, okay.’
‘I’d better live more fully?’ I suggest.
‘That’s right and it’s very humbling. It’s not my plan, but tomorrow if you hear news that I’ve died in some bizarre and mysterious way, it’s okay,’ she tells me.
It strikes me that Louisa has a very unique combination of beliefs. She lives her life trusting that God is in control of it but she also has an acute understanding that everything is fragile and uncertain, as if God doesn’t exist and things are utterly random. There’s no doubt that whatever it is she believes, it’s given her extraordinary resilience as she’s flipped over one bad hand of cards after another.
I’m very glad to say that in the months since Louisa and I had lunch, she has not died in some bizarre and mysterious way. She’s busy and content and we exchange friendly emails from time to time. Our conversation caused me to think deeply about the ways people cope with life’s blows, especially her insight that it’s a fantasy to imagine we have any control or any magical protection from bad things happening to us. Louisa’s logic is irrefutable and I know what she says is true. That doesn’t stop it from scaring me, or mean I’m keen to accept it.
As a journalist, I rely on a particular skill set when I want to find something out. I’m good at tracking people down. I know how to craft a line of questioning that helps them open up. I’m a strong listener and I follow up what people are saying. I can connect dots and identify interesting anecdotes. Those are handy tools, but even before meeting Louisa I’d already suspected that to find answers about the probability of being caught up in a newsworthy blindside, and how people react, I’d need more in my kit than that. I’d have to undertake real research, of the kind an expert would do, and that was out of my comfort zone.
I’m not an academic or a specialist in any field, so I wasn’t quite sure where to even start looking. I rang my friend Cathy, who’s a research librarian and an expert at navigating databases and book collections around the world. Her business card should say I Find Stuff That You Can’t.
‘If I pay you to work on your day off for a few months, do you reckon you can help me?’ I asked her.
She agreed and I gave her the broadest, most nebulous brief imaginable. I was slightly embarrassed by how imprecise it was but she seemed up for the challenge. She came around to my house one morning and installed some software called Mendeley on my laptop. This is a system for organising academic papers, and before I knew it she had indexed hundreds of journal articles under tags, such as ‘trauma’, ‘grief’, ‘adaptation’, ‘blame’, ‘memory’, and ‘survival’.
The reading Cathy prescribed for me proved hard work. There was plenty of maths, especially probability and statistics. I started by plucking out articles that seemed to look at the big picture: history and psychology and the science of how our brains work. Something started to take shape; it was clear that discomfort about what the future might hold, and finding ways to eliminate that uncertainty, cuts across almost every academic discipline, from maths to biology to economics.
For all recorded time, human beings have been fascinated by the intersection of destiny and chance and have craved ways to test and tame the Fates. We hate to feel vulnerable, and seek reassurance any way we can. We read horoscopes, pray to gods, visit clairvoyants, consult tarot cards, check weather forecasts, and scour news stories about our risk of contracting various diseases so we can take the necessary precautions against them. Gambling can be dated back to 3500 bc, thanks to an ancient form of dice uncovered during an archaeological dig in Egypt. And gamblers, along with people whose jobs involve precision, luck or high risk, such as sports stars, actors, soldiers and sailors, frequently turn to superstitious rituals for protection. It’s not just them either. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve approached a red traffic light and thought something like, If it turns green before I stop the car, I’ll pass the exam. And if I end up stopping the car? Okay, best of three.
Every day we ascribe significance to the most random, meaningless events so as to give ourselves a sense of control over our world. Human brains have evolved to need predictability. Our ancient ancestors had to make dozens of decisions every day that went to their very survival – what food was good to eat, what shelter would offer the best protection from the elements, what locations were safe from predators. Predictability was useful because it streamlined the decision-making process: if a plant had been safely eaten previously, it could be safely eaten again. The need for predictability was so strong that evolutionary biology caused our brains to permanently prefer it.
The brain gathers all sorts of data from the outside world and stores it as memories. Memories then help us to make decisions about how to act, by evaluating past experience against present reality. That mental process occurs in a split second for something as simple as climbing a set of stairs, but it can be more tortuous for complicated decisions, such as whether another person is trustworthy. The brain particularly loves patterns it can recognise because they foster predictability in the world around us and help eliminate unpleasant feelings of insecurity or unfamiliarity.
Many scientific experiments have demonstrated the brain’s preference for predictability over unpredictability. In one study, monkeys were given the option of two coloured targets, both of which came with rewards but only one of which gave advance information about what that reward would be. After a few days, the monkeys showed a clear preference for the target that gave information about the future. In another experiment, humans were found to prefer receiving a guaranteed electric shock over sitting with the uncertainty that they might or might not get a shock. In other words, people feel better about knowing what is coming – even if it is painful – than not knowing. It’s easier to prepare ourselves when we know what’s in store, whether it’s good or bad. There is thus a biological basis to the cliché ‘forewarned is forearmed’.
There is also a chemical reason for this preference for certainty and predictability. When our brains receive information that ‘makes sense’, they behave in the same way as when we satisfy any other craving: by releasing dopamine, a chemical that makes us feel pleasure. With dopamine, the body feels calm, content, comfortable, relieved and safe. By contrast, uncertainty feels closer to pain and the body tries to avoid it. People have varying levels of tolerance for the feeling of uncertainty. Somebody with obsessive-compulsive disorder, for example, has an extreme aversion to it.
The human bias towards predictability causes us to look for cause and effect in the world around us, even for things that defy easy explanation. The idea that everything happens for a reason is a reassuring thought, as if somewhere out there is a blueprint, dictating the course of our lives, even if we can’t see it. A sense of certainty comes with believing that things are under some form of control, whether somebody else’s or our own. For many people it’s comforting to believe that factors such as how hard we work, the choices we make, or the goodness of our deeds influence our destiny more than luck and chance do.
Does this kind of thinking square with the evidence, though? Many life-changing events – and even everyday ones – are arbitrary. D
id Louisa do something that meant she ‘deserved’ MS? Of course not. Neither did she deserve to have the misfortune to be one of the eighteen people in the Lindt Café while you or I were not. Why was it that Louisa lived but Tori and Katrina died? The brain wants an explanation so it can satisfy its desire for cause and effect. Something like the Lindt siege shatters our individual feeling of security and the brain desperately wants that restored. Such events don’t come with a ready explanation and yet the brain still hunts for one. It needs an answer so it can file the experience away and move on to thinking about less threatening things, like what to cook for dinner.
When the brain grapples with why something happened, or thinks, That could have been me, it relies on its usual device of searching for familiar patterns so it can help settle on an explanation with which to feel comfortable. My reading has led me to believe that in this quest, the brain is largely influenced by three things: past personal experience, evolutionary biology, and the experiences of others, this last often conveyed to us via the news media. Superficially, each of these things feels like it should be a sound guide. Actually, our bias towards predictability and explanation means that often we see what we want to believe rather than reality.
Personal experience – being what we’ve directly seen and felt – is hard to accept as unreliable. Yet our brains’ habits can trick us. Our desire for cause and effect inclines us to see connections where there are none. Take coincidence. You can find whole books devoted to extraordinary real-life coincidences, because they suggest there is more to life than random chance and serendipity. We love those stories. My car breaks down and I take the bus and I sit next to a stranger who becomes my future husband. The car was ‘meant’ to malfunction. It was destiny. Forget all the other times I’ve taken the bus uneventfully. The brain is disinclined to remember the dozens of unremarkable occurrences because it’s hardwired to remember the single unusual one (because it deviates from the predictable and therefore could be a threat to survival).
The more extraordinary the coincidence, the more unpredictable the event, and the greater the significance that the brain attributes to it. After the Lindt siege, there were numerous anecdotes from people who reported that they had left the café only minutes earlier, or they’d meant to go there that very morning but had a last-minute change of plans. Humans crave these tales of near misses, of signs heeded or fate cheated, because they assure us that our lives are special, that our existence has a unique significance to the universe, just as it has to ourselves. Such stories almost always appear after a disaster, including the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, after which Michigan’s Sault Ste Marie Evening News reported on the 7000-odd members of the ‘just missed it’ club, noting that most had ‘engaged passage but cancelled their reservations’ and that several hundred had ‘premonitions of disaster’.
There is a certain narcissism in this kind of thinking – or, as Louisa Hope puts it, ‘an absolute ratbag delusion’. It is patently ludicrous that the person who skipped their morning coffee on the day of the Lindt Café siege was special enough to be spared but Louisa and the other seventeen hostages were not.
Most unusual events, like being the victim of a terrorist attack, can be at least partially explained thanks to a mathematical theory called the Law of Large Numbers. When you take an enormous group of people (a ‘sample’), the chance of an extremely rare event occurring is greatly magnified. A one-in-a-million chance of something happening might seem very unlikely. Yet Australia’s population is 24 million: if every year, just a single one-in-a-million event happens somewhere in the country, twenty-four Australians will be that one.
The Law of Large Numbers explains why something that might feel highly significant to you personally may not in fact be unique. Say you dream that a friend died and the next day you find out that the friend has indeed passed away. No doubt you would find that coincidence highly memorable and think it meant something. Yet in 2003 a British statistician calculated the odds of dreaming about a friend’s death on the night it actually happens. He based his maths on Britain’s population at the time, 55 million (a gigantic sample), and assumed an average of one dream of a friend’s death per lifetime. He then factored in the national death rate of 2000 every 24 hours. Crunching those numbers, the odds of an accurate death dream in Britain are one every two weeks.
Given the size of the global population (7.5 billion), the Law of Large Numbers means that Lindt Café-type events are sadly common. What it doesn’t mean is that we are more likely to be caught in one ourselves. Our planet is the ultimate large sample. With so many of us, one individual’s chance of being the victim of the kind of blindside that lands in the news is still small. Our brains make the prospect seem more likely than it really is because they’re putting unusual events – the ones that defy past patterns – in neon lights.
If the chance of awful, random disasters affecting us personally is remote, why are we so rattled by them? And why do we worry so much about them happening to us? As with the brain’s preference for predictability, the answer lies in evolutionary biology, which, along with our personal experience, is often a key reason we draw the conclusions we do. Until about a millisecond ago, in terms of the span of human history, we lived together in small tribes. We stayed with the same people from birth to death. Our ancestors faced potentially catastrophic threats from things that are no longer much of a problem for most of us in the modern world: snakes, spiders, large cats and other predators, darkness, being alone, being exposed in an open place. Over many centuries, humans evolved to internalise the fear of those things, and today they remain some of our most common fears.
Our ancestors had great cause to fear situations that could claim many lives at once, and possibly wipe out most of a tribe’s population. Safety was in numbers, and the chances of survival improved with the size of the tribe. New threats, or those that had never been previously experienced, were also particularly terrifying, because the tribe could not prepare a response. Humans living today are genetically programmed through evolution to fear blindsides and disasters that result in mass casualties.
By looking at how our brains have evolved, scientists and psychologists have been able to map many of our common fears according to what they call ‘dread risk’. An event that is uncontrollable, unfair, unfamiliar, unimaginable, that causes huge suffering or leads to multiple fatalities and widespread destruction, is considered to have high dread risk. Events with high dread risk include chemical warfare, terrorism and gun massacres. Low dread risk events include smoking and falls from ladders. Thanks to biology, events with a high dread risk scare us more than those with a low one, even though the low are statistically more likely to cause death or injury. We know the dangers of smoking and climbing ladders but these feel like things we can control, unlike the question of when or where a terrorist might detonate a bomb.
The high dread risk of situations that claim many lives at once versus the low dread risk of things that cause more deaths spread over time is why many of us are more scared of the plane flight than the drive to the airport, despite the latter being statistically a far greater danger. It’s what makes nuclear accidents more gut-churning than obesity. We watch an event like the Lindt Café siege on the news and feel extremely vulnerable, even though the more probable risk to our personal longevity is the bowl of chips and the bottle of wine we consume while sitting in front of the TV. Our reaction is due to the ancient threats our ancestors faced and the way we’re wired as a result.
The news media reinforces both dread risk and the brain’s propensity to emphasise unusual events. The media is like the human brain writ large, relegating ordinary, everyday occurrences in favour of rare ones. If you often watch the news, you may come to believe that the events that are reported (terrorist attacks, shark maulings, child abductions) are more common than they really are. You might even come to think that such things are credible threats in your own life, thanks to the way you’re evolutionally designed to be on part
icular alert for mass casualty events and blindsides. You are instinctively protective of your ‘tribe’ and not intuitively likely to put the awful event into the context of the Law of Large Numbers.
Technology has also made the world more interconnected than ever and so the sample size for horrible events is simply gigantic. TV news is especially powerful because the image of one murdered child and his sobbing parents will make a far greater impact on you than the knowledge that millions of children played safely on the same day. The news doesn’t help you assess the gravest risks to your safety; instead, it distracts you from them by redirecting your fears to things that do not place you in much personal danger at all.
The way that our individual experiences, evolutionary biology and the news media mislead us means that most of the time when we think, That could have been me, we are most probably wrong. Even worse, those false conclusions can sometimes pose hazards almost as serious as the threat itself. In the months after the September 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States, Americans were afraid to fly and so planes carried about 17 per cent fewer passengers compared with the same period before the attacks. Instead, the number of miles driven increased by about 5 per cent, according to US government estimates. A 2006 study by three professors at Cornell University calculated that in the two years after 9/11, an estimated 2302 additional people were likely killed because they drove instead of flew (only 700 or so fewer than died in the terrorist attacks).
I fell into this kind of thinking myself in the midst of researching this chapter, when you might imagine I would have been more attuned to the pitfalls of irrational thinking. News came through of a terrible tragedy at the Dreamworld theme park on the Gold Coast. Four people were killed in a gruesome accident when one of the most popular rides malfunctioned. Like the Lindt Café siege, the event sent the community into deep shock. Many Australians have visited Dreamworld and so they felt vulnerable. I was as disturbed as anyone and that afternoon, when I picked up my children from their day care centre, I thought, I don’t want the boys to ever go on amusement park rides. I reached this dubious snap conclusion as I drove them home in my car.