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Dan Gilbert, professor of psychology at Harvard and the author of the best-selling “Stumbling on Happiness”, kicked off the second day of presentations at Pop!Tech with an entertaining talk about why humans carefully heed some risks and almost completely disregard others.

Using global warming as an example of a threat that fails to generate enough public attention, Gilbert delivered a captivating explanation of how our psyche-- one of the three core themes at this year's conference—processes risks and why we spend so little time processing threats which are of much greater importance in the longer run.

Gilbert starts his presentation with the “don't think of a white bear” anecdote. In Gilbert's version, Dostoevsky was once quite annoyed by a little child and, in revenge, told him to not to think about a white bear for the next ten minutes. Needless to say, it proved quite a tormenting endeavor (since Dostoevsky's times there have been a number of scientific experiments to prove this).

 Today, says Gilbert, we may not need to worry about not thinking about polar bears; soon they may face extinction. To prove his point, he pulls up an article from the New York Times, entitled “Warming Is Seen as Wiping Out Most Polar Bears”. This sets the overall concerned tone to the rest of Gilbert's presentation.

Gilbert then quotes from William James, who in 1879 said: “A new idea is first condemned as ridiculous and then dismissed as trivial, until finally, it becomes what everybody knows”. This is also true of global warming today; even George Bush talks about it. “And if George Bush knows something, then everybody else knows it”, jokes Gilbert.

Gilbert says he has had to share his own bit of wisdom with the (decaffeinated) world when Starbucks used one of its quotes on its “The Way I see it” series. What he chose to say, he says, also helps to explain our reaction to phenomena like global warming:

"The human brain is the only object in the known universe that can predict its own future and tell its own fortune. The fact that we can make disastrous decisions even as we foresee their consequences is the great, unsolved mystery of human behavior. When you hold your fate in your hands, why would you make a fist?"

We all behave prudently, says Giblert. We stick to sensible diets. We remain relatively monogamous. We floss our teeth. We are ready to change the type of the light bulbs we use to save our planet. While a lot of it may seem trivial on the surface, those are actually quite complex decisions made with consequences in mind.

Why then do we respond to global warming in such a passive manner, almost devoid of any urgency or sense of responsibility?

It may be because global warming is actually unlike any other threat we face. It's a threat that our brains are uniquely unsuited to do anything about.

Traditional fears that have helped us go through the evolutionary period have four features, to which we decisively respond. Whenever those four features are missing, we don't respond to them as strongly. Global warming is that particular kind of threat that lacks the four features

Next follows a slide with pictures of Hitler, Saddam, Osama, Stalin. Gilbert says that our brain works in a way that we always think a lot about other people. Quite often, it's for the purposes of understanding what other people are up to; this kind of thinking has been crucical to the survival of our species. No wonder our brains are hyper-vigilant: they are on the look-out for any signs of threats from other humans.

Gilbert pulls up a famous slide with a bunch of points that resemble a walking adult male; we almost certainly recognize a man out of those dots, but we rarely recognize dots when we look at the picture of a human male – we look for things that look threatening.

Gilbert laments the fact that small insignificant accidents do not get our attention. We worry about anthrax that has an annual death of zero rather than influenza that kills hundreds of thousands per annum. Why? Because anthrax involves some human evil conspiring and can be attributed to a given person; not so with influenza. Global warming is not trying to kill us; if it had hired men with beards to do that, Gilbert is sure that George Bush would have had us fighting it with or without congressional approval.So, this is feature number one: we see threats that have a human face as more dangerous.

Moving on, Gilbert points out that global warming doesn't violate our normal sensibility either. It doesn't make our blood boil. It's not something that makes us disgusted. There are a few things that arouse deep emotional feelings in us – they include food and sex, for example – but definitely not the type of scientific communication that global warming converses in. Thus, while we may deeply care about whom we and others sleep with, we don't equally care about air conditioning.

Feelings of disgust compel us to action. Global warming is bad and we often worry about it, but it doesn't make us feel nauseated. It's hard to imagine most people as worked up against it as they get worked up about flag burning. Thus, concludes Gilbert, if global warming was caused by gay sex or by eating puppets, millions of Americans would be protesting in the streets. So, the second feature of a threat we are ready to act upon is that its consequences or causes have to be seen as immoral.

The third fundamental problem with the lack of public reaction to the problem is that global warming is a threat to our future but not to our present. That's why we are quicker at protecting animals that are about to get extinct; their extinction is a matter of years, if not months, and we realize that. Or consider this example, says Gilbert: when we get a baseball heading in our direction, we would do our best to avoid it, as we know that it's a very urgent task that may lead to dire consequences.

In a sense, the brain is uniquely positioned to process such threats. It has learnt how to predict the occurrence of threats long before they actually happen. Taking action against threats that have not yet materialized is a major behavior factor in everything we do, says Gilbert. It's the reason why we have dental floss and 401k plans.

However, this particular ability is, evolutionary speaking, in the first phases of R&D of our brain. Currently, a very small part of our brain is actually responsible for thinking about the future, and a very large part thinking about the immediate, now-kind-of threats (think about that baseball heading in your direction). That gives us the third feature: we are good at processing threats that are abrupt and that happen quickly and make big changes that are visible.

Finally, we all know that the human brain is very sensitive to changes in pressure, light, temperature, etc – but we also know-- particularly from physics-- that the brain is sensitive to relative changes, not absolute changes. For example, when pace of change of stimuli is slow enough, it goes undetected. To illustrate his point, Gilbert shows a picture of a farmhouse in some green field. Although the picture looks like a still, it's actually changing as Gilbert speaks-- but of those in the audience don't and won't see the change.

As we don't see the changes that happen gradually, we accept changes that happen gradually totally disarmed. This is how problems like pollution and congestion came about; as it happens one day at a time, what we see is relative change, and it's very small. We transform our world at slow rates, and we don't notice that.

Finally, says Gilbert, although scientists lament the fact that global warming is happening fast, the problem is that it's now happening fast enough to generate global universal awareness and the eagerness to help stop it.

Terrorism is a good example of a threat that pushes every one of our brain buttons correctly: whenever we see evil people who threaten our security, we respond firmly and strongly, even eager to give up our civil rights. Unfortunately, global warming pushes non of those buttons, says Gilbert. It's a threat, it's, in fact, a deadly threat only because it fails to trigger the brain's alarm. It remains to be seen if we can teach ourselves to arouse against a deep, covert enemy that is far more dangerous than our ancestors ever imagined. The good thing, jokes Gilbert, is that it's going to be very easy to find out whether we are doomed or not: it's a purely empirical question, we just need to wait long enough!