Steven Spielberg’s new film, Disclosure Day, opened this past weekend, and every trailer for it circles back to the same question: if proof arrived tomorrow that humanity is not alone in the universe, would it terrify you?

It’s a good question for a thriller. It may also be the wrong question, or at least an incomplete one. The film treats terror as the natural, default response to such a revelation, the spark that sets off cover-ups, panic, and existential vertigo. But the terror isn’t a fact about the universe. It’s a fact about the brain, specifically about what happens when one of the brain’s oldest alarm systems collides with one of its newest ideas. And Jewish tradition, it turns out, worked through that collision a very long time ago.

Why “we’re not alone” sounds like a threat

The brain doesn’t experience the world directly. It runs on predictions: a working model of how things are, built up over a lifetime, that it constantly checks against incoming information. Most of the time the model holds, and the world feels stable. But when something arrives that the model has no place for, the brain doesn’t shrug. It treats the mismatch itself as a kind of danger, regardless of whether the new information is actually threatening.

“We are not the only minds in the cosmos” is exactly that kind of information. It doesn’t threaten anyone physically, but it threatens a deeply held assumption about humanity’s place at the center of the story. Terror management theory, developed by researchers........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)