Your Brain on COVID-19

Why our minds struggle to process abstract dangers

- Carolyn Abraham

At this moment, a savage microbe is holding the human world hostage, forcing nearly 4 billion of our industrious, gallivanting kind into a society of shut-ins. Confined to our homes — if we’re lucky enough to have them — we’re banding apart, hoping to slow the spread and deprive a greedy pathogen of any more human hosts. COVID-19 already has plenty.

Indoors indefinitely, we watch the outside world through our screens. We see New York’s wrapped bodies stacked and refrigerated, army trucks carrying off Italy’s dead, rising curves, health care workers weeping, politicians clinging to poise, and we wonder: Should I buy more canned goods? Is my family safe? Can I still smell stuff? Did our lockdown come too late? Will there be jobs when it’s over? When will it be over? Is it okay to walk the dog?

Humans are not well designed for this slow-burn brand of threat. We’re better equipped for one-off attacks than abstract menaces. Give us muggers, hurricanes, sabre-toothed tigers, hazards that compel us to battle or run for our lives — not the protracted uncertainty of a contagion that has killed tens of thousands and counting.

So just how is the human brain responding to all this?

“It’s screaming,” says Susan Krauss Whitbourne, a professor of psycho logical and brain sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “I know, it’s a very technical term,” she jokes. “But, in our brains, there’s a lot of screaming going on right now.”