Psychic Equivalence Versus Reality What Is In The Mind May Be
Imagination When author Malcolm Gladwell followed up “The
Tipping Point” with “Blink”, he pointed out that people can be
psychologically “primed” to interpret a stimulus incorrectly.
That happens with flight anxiety. Since anxiety is tied to
something going wrong, an anxious flier is “primed” to interpret
almost any stimulus as the first sign of doom. If we could
prevent that priming, a lot of flight anxiety would disappear.
How can we do that? Though intellectual understanding can’t
totally end the anxiety problem, it can help reduce “priming”.
Here’s how. When you go onboard a plane with the belief that if
anything at all goes wrong, you are doomed, any stimulus that
comes into your awareness leads to distress. But when you go
onboard a plane knowing that every modern jetliner has a primary
system, a standby system, a backup system and an emergency
system for everything needed to get you from point A to point B,
you go onboard with a different “p