Ask a Reporter: How Your Brain Navigates a Pandemic
A quick interview with science reporter and brain expert Dana Smith
At this point in the pandemic, your brain might feel fried. Life has turned into a game of risk, as Elemental’s senior writer Dana Smith reported this week, and every decision now requires fraught assessments of what’s safe and what’s not. I caught up with Dana over Slack about how the brain is processing the pandemic and how she approaches the coronavirus coverage cycle.
Alexandra Sifferlin, blog editor: You recently published a mega-feature on what navigating everyday life is like for the brain and how people assess risks and make decisions in moments of uncertainty and fear. What for you was the most enlightening thing you learned from the reporting?
Dana Smith, health and science writer: Diving right in with a meaty one! I like it. The interaction between disgust sensitivity and risk aversion was fascinating to me and made total sense. One aspect of that research that didn’t make it into the article was that the connection is strongest between disgust and risk of bodily harm, followed by social risk, and then financial risk at the bottom. So, the connection really has to do with the body, and more abstract risks, like losing money, are less strongly linked to disgust.
