The TV in the background giving the latest reports of the Japanese tragedy creates a fear response if heard for milliseconds so fast that you can’t register it. The brain needs 30 milliseconds for the brain to consciously pick it up. So that unconscious fear and anxiety residing in the amygdala can be blocking critical IQ and decision making resources without you knowing it. Imagine the fear, complexity, and seriousness of the decisions Japanese leaders needed to make in the wake of the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear reactor dysfunction. It is easy to have \u00abinformation fatigue,\u00bb while critical time lost is adding to the problems. When our thinking gets temporally impaired like these examples above, it is like we are operating with fewer IQ points.<\/p>\n