Why is it easy to imagine sights, sounds and smells in vivid detail, but so much harder to conjure up the suffering you’d feel in intense heat? Blame your brain wiring.
Your ability to sense things just by thinking about them, which neuroscientists call simulation, requires vast networks of interconnected neurons.This neural limitation, I suggest, is a key reason why more people aren’t terrified by climate change. Most of us can easily imagine the sight of polar ice caps melting, and we might feel distressed as we think about coastal cities flooding. But thanks to our brain wiring, few of us can simulate the feeling of blasting heat or the awfulness of other disasters we’d face every day in a warming world.