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What’s Next for News?deeper and more durable. We need tounderstand what the transformationof our information environment hasdone at the most fundamental level tothe way people take in news.Emotional HeatMy struggle with this question led meto the science of how the brain processesinformation, especially the wayemotion directs attention. Of course,it did not take the rise of modernneuroscience to prove that emotionholds an audience. Sophocles knewthat when he wrote his drama of incestand violence, “Oedipus Rex.” So do theeditors of supermarket tabloids. Counton fear and sex to attract the eye.Evolution provides the reason:Our ancestors became our ancestorsby being able to spot danger andthe opportunity to mate. So it wasinevitable that as competition forattention exploded with the revolutionaryinformation technologies ofthe late 20th and early 21st centuries,message senders raised the emotionalvolume. Serious journalists tended todecry this as infotainment or worse.Perhaps they never themselves quitelived up to the professional ideal ofutter disinterest and detachment, butthey did learn to draw back from rawemotional appeals.The audience did not. This baffledmany of us. How could people betaken in by screaming commentators(on everything from health careto basketball), by celebrity gossip,by reports characterized at best bytruthiness rather than the rigors ofverification?Here is where the implications of therapidly developing science of the mindhelp. It turns out that certain kinds ofcognitive challenges (challenges to ourthinking) produce emotional arousal.And an emotionally aroused brain isdrawn to things that are emotionallycharged.Give normal humans a trickyanagram or a long division probleminvolving two numbers out to sixdecimal points, and they will beginto show emotional arousal—think ofit as stress. Give them a strict timelimit, and their level of arousal willrise. Throw new information at them(some of it useful, some irrelevant,some just wrong) while they areworking on the problem, and theiremotional temperature will go upeven more. Then distract them (sayby calling their names or having theirsmartphones signal that somebodyis trying to reach them), and theirarousal level will soar.If that sounds familiar, it is. All toofamiliar. Information overload, timepressure, and distraction characterizeour era. The very nature of the informationenvironment in which we alllive creates emotional arousal. We areavailable every moment to everyonewe know, and an enormous number ofpeople we do not know. We continuouslyreceive messages: messages ofa particular sort—the kind that aredirected specifically to us. They comefrom people who know us personallyor from people or institutions thathave learned something about whatinterests us.In effect, these ubiquitous messagescall out our names. Consequently welive in a continuous state of interruptionand distraction. Time pressureis enormous. Even after leaving theTribune Company to write books, Idiscovered that people expected me torespond to e-mails within a couple ofhours, if not a couple of minutes, andwere offended if I did not.So not only has the explosionof competition among suppliers ofinformation—news, advertising andentertainment—caused producers toincrease the emotional temperature,the recipients of information havebecome more attracted to emotionalheat. This helps explain why heavynews seekers turn to the intensityof Fox News or MSNBC and awayfrom CNN. (It also explains why theonce rather restrained National Geographicchannel has so many showsabout predator species that prey onhumans—species that include Homosapiens themselves.)Where Journalism FitsThis rise in emotional intensity posesa real problem for serious journalists,as I describe in my book “What IsHappening to News: The InformationExplosion and the Crisis in Journalism.”1 We have been trained for manygood reasons to shy away from it in thepresentation of news. But we see ouraudience drawn to it. And we do noteven have a way of discussing whichuses of emotion are misleading ormanipulative and which actually canhelp people understand their world.The sciences of the mind offer a lotof help if we are willing to learn fromthem. They explain, for example, whythe immediate crowds out the important.Why bad news attracts attentionmore than good news does. They canshow us how emotion interacts withthe human brain’s inherent mentalshortcuts to lead us systematicallyto erroneous conclusions. They canpoint us to the ways in which searchalgorithms interact with emotionsand these mental shortcuts to misleadpeople about the relative importanceof various pieces of information. Theycan even help us understand the wayour ability and impulse to read otherpeople’s minds draws us to a story andlight up other secrets of how and whynarrative works.It should be clear by now that thechallenge for journalists from hereforward is not only the steadfastadherence to the values of accuracyand independence and the socialresponsibility to provide a civic educationbut also the development of new1Chapter Six, “The Two Searchlights,” in Jack Fuller’s book describes neuroscienceresearch about emotion and attention and how it is relevant to the way journalistspresent their stories. Read it online at http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/268989.html.6 Nieman Reports | Summer 2010