Neighbors lingered a long time on the lawns and street, long after the emergency workers and police had left. There was nothing we could do to help, but nobody seemed quite ready to give up the sense of solidarity that emerges around such threatening experiences.

It's been known for some time that our heightened vigilance can trigger a biological response as well. We're heading into flu season now, so we're primed to be circumspect, and this in turn puts the body's disease-fighting cells on high alert. But does it also work the other way around?

Unfortunately, there is no magic pill that will inoculate us from these cognitive biases. But we can reduce their power over us by understanding these distortions.

We think of Spokane and Olympia as psychologically close because they're both in Washington, even though Olympia is actually much closer to Portland, Ore. The mapmaker in our neurons favors the category over actual proximity.

Psychologists who've studied our decision-making processes have observed cognitive biases that tend to get us in trouble. These biases don't make you a bad person, they just make you human.