Terrorism is everywhere. Only it isn't.
By Marc Siegel

An unnerved patient came to see me last month in my mid-Manhattan doctor's office. She said she was so affected by seeing the London bombings on TV that she had finally decided to move from New York City.

"Where are you going?" I asked.

"A town outside Philadelphia," she replied.

She thought the City of Brotherly Love was far enough away from the primary targets — New York and Washington D.C. — to be safe.

But this woman's overt fear of terrorism is the exception. For most of us, our worry remains an underlying hum that is goosed from time to time by attacks like the ones last month in London and Egypt.

In March 2004, it was the train bombings in Madrid that fed the global unease. But most of our fear still stems from the attacks in the United States on Sept. 11, 2001. Fear and foreboding have become common reactions to terrorism in general and no longer appear limited to particular attacks.

A steady fear

Polls show that our overall fear has remained fairly constant since 2001. An Associated Press/Ipsos poll the week after the July 7 bombings in London found 57% of us believe an attack on mass transit is inevitable, and 37% are concerned they or their loved ones will be the victims. These percentages have remained steady over the past year. But polls also indicate that recent attacks — including the failed bombings July 21 in London and the successful ones two days later in Sharm el-Sheik, Egypt — increase the public expectation elsewhere that the next strike might come soon. A USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll just after the London bombings found that 55% said an act of terrorism on U.S. soil was likely in the next few weeks.

Even when an attack occurs overseas, people in the USA and elsewhere personalize this news, which is difficult to avoid because of the widespread coverage and the 24-hour news cycle. In New York and other major cities, the increased surveillance and random bag and backpack checks in the wake of the recent bombings are intended to make people feel safer. But visible surveillance also has the unfortunate effect of sending the message that an attack might be in the offing. As a result, people tend to be more on the alert for a strike that might never come and is extremely unlikely to affect them personally even if it does.

Terrorism is much more about fear than it is about actual risk. After 9/11, a new phobia about airplanes led to more people taking to the road, despite the fact that more than 40,000 people die in traffic accidents in the USA each year. Fewer have died in commercial airplane accidents over the past half century.

Your chance of dying during your next plane trip? One in 15 million. During your next car trip? One in 7.6 million. In other words, if being afraid of being on a plane leads you to drive, you instantly double your chances of being in a fatal accident.
 

Elevating our stress levels

The main problem is that we are all powerful voyeurs. Rather than learning to be safe by avoiding true dangers, we take what we see on TV and apply it directly to our own lives. We immerse ourselves in the information of the latest terrorist attack, ramping up our own stress levels and planting seeds of fear.

Subway commuters in New York can almost hear the London detonators go off two weeks after the initial attacks, and TV-broadcasted winds of the latest hurricane feel as if they're right around the corner even when they're thousands of miles away.

Elizabeth Phelps, professor of psychology and neural science at New York University, has been researching the effects of perceived danger on the human brain. She has added her findings to the pioneering work of Joe LeDoux, another neuroscientist at NYU. It turns out that the brain has a fear center, known as the amygdala. It's a tiny almond-shaped structure deep inside the brain that emits fear signals and initiates an outpouring of stress hormones.

The body reacts, ready for fight or flight. But even when there is no imminent danger — no one to fight, no one to flee from — the effect lingers. This causes unnecessary anxiety and worry.

Though Ledoux's work on the amygdala is well established in animals, Phelps' applications to humans are still somewhat preliminary. Using the latest techniques in magnetic resonance imaging exam, Phelps has studied the brain's response to videos of dangerous situations rather than real dangers. She has shown that the effects on the brain's physiology are the same with a simulated attack as with a real one. Internet, television, movies — these are all vehicles for the type of response that Phelps has studied. Visualized threats get our juices going, and we are ready to respond.

To be sure, individual citizens can't control or defeat terrorists in this country or any other, and it's this feeling of helplessness and uncertainty that compounds what terror achieves. Even so, what we can control is our perspective and our understanding of the world.

Will terrorists strike on our soil again? That's highly likely. Will you or someone you know be a victim of the next attack? That's highly unlikely.

A little perspective will go a long way in today's age of terror.

Marc Siegel's False Alarm: The Truth About the Epidemic of Fear will be published this month. He is a member of USA TODAY's board of contributors

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Copyright © 1990-2007 Marc K. Siegel, M.D.