I have read that "it's not a story until something bad happens". You get the idea: we can't hardly take note until there is a danger, a sadness, a loss that might happen to us, or one that reminds us of one that did. It is another version of good news gets ignored or forgotten. Only when our alarm or emotion systems get activated, do we pay strong attention.
One of the first courses in my psych doctoral minor was psychophysics, the brain and our senses of perception. I guess we humans have been pondering and considering and thinking and weighing for a long time but we are still wired for survival, so even though we can think, we get motivated to do so by worries and dangers. We are watching "Unforgotten" on PBS and "Virgin River" on Netflix. The PBS show is about British police finding a skeleton in a basement floor and it shows a murder took place 40 years ago. In the Netflix show, a young nurse/midwife moved to a small town in northern California after losing a baby in a stillbirth.
Our internal alarm systems that get us worrying seem to energize us enough to produce energy to pay attention to the plights of life and the artificial plights of fiction and imagination. Long before the printing press (about 1440), Greek drama and worldwide storytellers and troubadours and poets and speakers got us thinking about possible dangers under our bed and in the basement. Of course, since radio and television and movies came on the scene, we have more ways to stimulate our imaginations without books or decoding letters. Some of my older friends whose vision is poor make good use of audiobooks so their mental lives get stimulated through their ears.
