Brain Downplays Personal Death Threat

Our brains do their best to keep us from dwelling on our inevitable demise, and a study found that the brain shields us from existential fear by categorizing death as an unfortunate event that only befalls other people. In a study done in 2019, researchers used EEG to show that when volunteers saw their own faces linked with death-related words, their brains blocked the usual prediction response, suggesting a built-in mechanism that stops us from treating our own deaths as real future events.

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