A rapt student of my species' stranger behaviours, I have been waiting, hitherto in vain, for a plausible explanation of why so many pandemic-driven folk have been panic-buying all the toilet paper and other hoardable treasures they, wild-eyed, can carry away.
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Now, writing for the online The Walrus, Carolyn Abraham in her piece Your Brain on Covid-19 seeks to explain some of what is going through our bewildered and skittish minds at the moment.
Explaining the toilet paper plundering is not a major theme of her piece but in mentioning it she is making a larger point. And methinks her larger point helps explain, too, the urgency lots of us have felt about getting our jabs and the post-jab euphoria that follows.
That larger point, arrived at after her quoted consultations galore with ace psychologists, is that in our helplessness the pandemic menace is stampeding us into feeling the need to actually DO something, and that panic-buying is one of the somethings we are feeling driven to do.
"Indoors indefinitely, we watch the outside world [and especially its tragic Covid news] through our screens," Abraham says, diagnosing that what we see is stoking in us worries galore.
"[But] humans are not well designed for this slow-burn brand of threat. We're better equipped for one-off attacks than abstract menaces. Give us muggers, hurricanes, sabre-toothed tigers, hazards that compel us to battle or run for our lives - not the protracted uncertainty of a contagion that is killing tens of thousands."
And so Susan Krauss Whitbourne, a professor of psychological and brain sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, tells Abraham that the coronavirus pandemic has triggered the brain's ancient alarm system.
"I know it's not a very technical term but, in our brains, there's a lot of screaming going on right now," the professor explains.
Abraham perseveres: "As with everything else Covid-19 has exposed - bare-bones health care systems, threadbare social safety nets, fragile economies - it has also unmasked the flaws of our neurobiology, glitches in the way we assess risk and in the fight-or-flight way we react to it.''
"The brain wants to act in stressful situations,'' says Steven Taylor, a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia and the author of The Psychology of Pandemics.
"With the global spread of the coronavirus, we see the threat is major, the scope is massive, the whole world is affected; we're primed for big action - and the instructions are: wash your hands!"
For some, Taylor says, that just doesn't seem like enough. "People want to feel like they're doing something rather than just sitting at home twiddling thumbs.
"All this contributes to a sense that people have lost control of their lives - and people, primed to act when in a state of fear, want the illusion of control. This is why so many of us shift into panic-buying mode, Taylor says - not only to give ourselves an action we can carry out in the face of a threat but also because stockpiling goods gives us the illusion of having some command of the situation."
But Taylor never predicted the patterns of 'quirky hoarding' that the 21st century pandemic would bring. In his Vancouver, he says, it's been cannabis, and almost everywhere, toilet paper. 'I'm so sick of talking about toilet paper, I can't tell you,' he sighs."
And although your columnist has done no quirky hoarding, I'm sure I see in Abraham's thesis an explanation of why some of us are getting such a buzz, such rapture, from arranging our vaccinations.
I drove a long, long way to go and get my first vaccination but drove with optimistic songs in my heart the whole way there (they included Herman's Hermits' bouncy rendition of Carol King's I'm Into Somethin' Good and Adina's effervescent song My Face Is My Pharmacy of Love from Donizetti's opera The Elixir of Love) and then with another selection of jollity songs the whole way home (they included Billy Joel's love-affirming Uptown Girl and Papageno and Papagena's lustful duet Pa pa pa pa, from Mozart's The Magic Flute). I'm so cultured.
I sense this jab euphoria comes in large part from the sense that in getting vaccinated one is at last pro-actively DOING something to fight back against what Abraham calls "the savage microbe [Covid-19] that is holding the whole world hostage".
If our primitive reptilian brains are only giving us the limited choice of either fighting Covid-19 or fleeing from it, screaming, then to be vaccinated feels somehow like a decision to stand up and fight, our hackles raised, our fangs bared.