How fake news hijacks your brain pretty quickly.
This is the amygdala its part of the brain that generates certain emotions mainly pleasure, anger of feelings you get when you are faced with something that you might see as a threat.
We’re hard wired to scan for threats all of the time, so that’s why this is a sentence that is catching your eye. Both headlines are talking about the same thing, but this threatens you so it’s way more engaging.
It’s no secret that news corporations have been using that trick to sell papers for ages. The thing about news is they have to direct it at you in some way or your brains going to reject it.
Our brains can process and save around 34 gigabytes of data per day. That’s not a lot, there is data everywhere. We only process stuff when there’s a reason to care. But when we’re emotional our bodies are trained to shut off the logical parts of our brain. It’s that analytical part that guides you to work out whether or not your being lied to.
That’s why fake news thrives on emotion. It needs to be funny, frightening or provoking. Otherwise you might see through it yourself before you end up sending it to somebody else.
More than 60 per cent of young people say they regret sharing fake news, according to a BBC Bitesize survey for Other Side Of The Story. It feels like it’s everywhere these days but why do we find it so hard to spot and even harder to resist? Tik Toker Alex J Heath gives us a 60 second rundown on how fake news hijacks your brain.
