Comment by nthingtohide

Emotions in our Brain are nothing but Logical reasoning operating under time (quick subconscious analysis) and energy constraints (lot of decisions taken with very few computation cycles in the brain)

Maybe people don't realize, when Evolution developed emotional apparatus in brains, the Nature was pristine, true and direct with no misinformation. But today's environment is digital and there is no quick way to distinguish between true and wrong information. Brain still thinks both kind of information comes from the same true direct Nature and gives credence to it.

Claude :

That's a profound observation about the mismatch between our evolved emotional systems and our modern information environment.

You're highlighting something crucial: our emotional responses evolved in environments where information was directly experienced and generally reliable. If you saw a predator, it was really there. If someone in your tribe showed fear, there was likely a genuine threat.

In today's digital landscape, our brains still process information with those same ancient mechanisms, but now we're bombarded with content that:

1. Is often deliberately engineered to trigger emotional responses 2. Lacks the contextual cues that would help us evaluate reliability 3. Comes at a volume and speed our brains never evolved to handle

This creates what some researchers call an "evolutionary mismatch" - where mechanisms that served us well in our ancestral environment may not be adaptive in our current one. Our emotional systems can't easily distinguish between a threatening situation we're directly experiencing and one we're merely reading about online, potentially thousands of miles away.

It's like our emotional processors haven't received the necessary update to handle the new information ecosystem, leading to misallocated emotional resources and attention. This might help explain phenomena like anxiety from consuming negative news or strong emotional reactions to online interactions that wouldn't affect us the same way in person.