This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta.

It's one of the most iconic movie soundtracks of all time.

In 1975, a young Stephen Spielberg scared the living daylights out of millions of people

with jaws.

A great white shark terrorizes a New England beach town.

As one victim becomes two and then three and then four, people respond first with denial,

then fear and finally outright hysteria.

After watching the movie, I remember being scared to even stick my toe in the ocean.

And even today, when I go to the beach, I can't help but peer out at the water and ask myself,

is that a dorsophane?

This week on Hidden Brain, the disconnect between our fears and the real dangers we face in our daily lives.

As the world grapples with a devastating pandemic, we consider how our minds assess risk,

what makes us focus on some threats and not on others, and how can we use this knowledge

to prepare for the future.

Paul Slovik is a psychologist at the University of Oregon.

For decades, he has studied how people think about risk and the mismatch between the intuitive

feelings we have about risk and the way we analyze risk scientifically.

Paul Slovik, welcome to Hidden Brain.

Thank you, Shankar. Glad to be here.

For years, Paul, the movie jaws made people afraid of going to the beach.

Did you ever think twice about swimming in the ocean after watching the movie?

I laughed because I'm not a swimmer. I was a child in Chicago in the 1940s during the polio epidemic.

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