“Morbidly Curious: A Scientist Explains Why We Can’t Look Away”

Slow down.

You see flashing lights ahead — an accident, maybe, or a road closed. You reduce speed because you don’t want anyone to get hurt further, and you don’t want to be in the way. Take your time getting beyond this. And as in the new book, “Morbidly Curious” by Eureka Springs’ Coltan Scrivner, PhD, look quick. You don’t want to miss anything.

Because you just can’t not look. Pass by a disaster, and your eyes are drawn to the wreckage. Step into a theater and watch a city being destroyed. Blow up cars in a video game. You can’t help it — but why are we such morbid creatures?

Morbid, says Scrivner, is all about “death or the things that lead to it,” while “morbid curiosity is a curiosity about things that are threatening or potentially dangerous.” The latter, he says, “motivates us to face fear, disgust, and the unknown,” compelling us to look at bad things to assess their immediate threat, thereby making them less personally menacing. Moreover, it moves us toward a “predisposition… called prepared learning,” in which our minds spot and remember dangers or possible threats.

Many other mammals exhibit morbid curiosity — but not as strong as we do.

We love action movies, true crime books and violent video games because morbid curiosity allows us to “safely engage with” danger. It helps us stay alert but civil in a large crowd. It explains why you feel a sense of creepiness in a haunted house — even if you’re a skeptic. It helps us to process nightmares. Because we’re a society that generally has little intimate contact with death, he says, it helps us to know the difference between a living body and a dead one. It’s also possible, says Scrivner, that morbid curiosity acts as a psychological function that helps us process grief.

Your bookshelves are full of stories of murder and bloodshed. Your lengthy To-Be-Watched list is pretty similar. And no, you’re not some sort of ghoul; read “Morbid Curiosity” and you can blame your interests on your brain.

No doubt, you’re familiar with the concept of fight-or-flight. Author Coltan Scrivner takes it a step further to explain why we can’t look away from things that should terrify us or at least make us curl our lips, eeeeuuuw. He shows why we actually need to look at disaster in some form or another in order to survive and live in polite society, before taking his science to the theater to show that movies aren’t quite as violent as we think they are; then he turns his eye toward the nursery, to prove that even toddlers need a safe, gentle scare sometimes, too. This makes an interesting read, especially if you’ve ever wondered what level of consumption of danger is safe for you or your kids.

“Morbidly Curious” can sometimes be deep but it nicely explains your guilty pleasures and your inability to ignore disasters. It’s great for true crime fans, and for anyone who just wants to grab a good science book and slow down.

— The Bookworm Sez