Terrorism and our Brains

As a species, there are certain things that we have evolved to be very good at, certain methods of thinking that we have used to survive, certain tools to our survival that have become ingrained in our DNA. However, human history is very interesting in how much we've changed culturally, and technologically in such a short amount of time. As a result, some of our methods of thinking can even be said to lag behind our technology and lifestyles. For example, human beings are very good at learning events, activities, even vague images and smells. Something we are very bad at learning, however, is numbers, statistics, certain logical data that can be hard to grasp at an instant glance. In some fields this isn't particularly harmful, our social lives, for example, isn't damaged by our inability to understand the significance of numbers, but there are other things that are very much affected by these shortcomings of the human brain.
Terrorism is a relatively new word to describe a sort of activity that has been happening throughout much of human history. Acts intended to frighten or intimidate enemies have happened in some form or another in nearly every civilization's history. What gets lost, however, is that these attacks actually harm very few people, even today in a time when it seems like you can't go a week without hearing about a terror attack, in part because people are guarenteed to watch every piece of news that comes out of it. This is in stark contrast to some very important statistics. Studies have found that from 1975 to 2015 exactly 3,024 people have died due to foreign-born terrorism, including the 2,983 people killed in the World Trade Center attacks. That averages about 76 Americans per year. It's important to note that after 9/11/01 foreign terrorists have killed, on average, one American per year, with a running total of eight Americans having been killed by ISIS.
The point to be made here is further emphasized when you examine the odds of one dying from any given cause.

To provide further analysis of this table, you and I are theoretically five and a half times more likely to die due to the police than we are from any form of foreign terrorism. We are also ten and a half times more likely to die due to bicycling than terrorism, and 13.4 times more likely to die chocking on food. But these statistical facts get pushed to the background of our minds when we spend a week looking at news about terrorist attacks.

The point I truly want to make here is that there are so many larger causes of death to combat in our lives than terrorism. The leading causes of death in the US are Heart Disease, Cancer, Physical injury, and Chronic Lung Disease, however no organization to reduce these problems has anywhere near the amount of funding our military has had historically. If you were to ask someone who works for the Center for Disease Control, "How much should the US spend on fighting a disease that kills 1 American per year," they would look at you like you were crazy, yet that is exactly what so much of our federal funding goes toward.

What I suggest is that more people look at news with more awareness of the effects it has on our brains. It is not a matter of simply not watching news about terrorism, but rather maintaining the ability to make rational decisions about what sort of policies we support, and what kind of politicians we trust to make rational decisions in the world stage.