Verified by News: Save Yourself!
Trying to dodge a threat? Your brain has some tricks up its sleeve.
By Matt Huston published November 5, 2012 - last reviewed on June 9, 2016
When danger looms, you can fight, you can flee, or you can devise the safest reaction by analyzing the threat in milliseconds—thanks to these subtle tools of human survival.
Spider Sense
Not only do we instantly spot certain longtime environmental threats like poisonous spiders, but we can innately gauge how dangerous they are. A paper in Evolution and Human Behavior reports that participants looking for spiders in an array of photos spotted lethal arachnids faster and more accurately than harmless ones.
Fight Delay
Approaching dangers look and sound as if they’re going to reach us sooner than they actually will, and this adaptive misperception gives us an extra split-second to prepare. One recent study found that people in poor health perceive threats even sooner than those who are physically fit, upping their chances to react in time.
Location, Location, Location
Our threat-detecting brains are carefully attuned to contextual clues. A recent study in Cognition and Emotion demonstrates that we spot weapons in an urban environment more quickly than in a natural environment, and we’re more attentive to animals in nature than on the street.
