A small incident in my car taught me more about thinking than many abstract discussions about intelligence.
I once accidentally dropped a charging cable into the car’s power socket (a cigarette lighter one). The metal tip touched something inside. There was a spark. The socket stopped working.
Immediately, a familiar chain of thoughts followed. This is broken. It is probably complicated. It will require service. It will cost money.
I spent the rest of the day quietly anxious. I kept replaying the problem, but every mental path led to the same place: inconvenience, expense, and helplessness.
At night, I went to sleep.
In a dream, I saw someone handling very small parts. Fuses. That was the word that surfaced. When I woke up, I remembered the dream and realized that my car has a fuse box. I opened it, found the burned fuse, ordered a replacement, installed it myself, and everything worked.
I am not technically skilled. I do not repair electronics. I did not learn anything new during the night. I just remembered (I knew about fuses just enough to know what they are for).
The solution was already somewhere in my memory. What changed was not my knowledge. It was which idea became reachable.
Stress does not make us irrational. It makes us narrow.
When we are under stress, the brain does something very predictable. Attention contracts. Exploration collapses. Habitual explanations dominate. Alternative hypotheses stop competing. This is not a flaw. It is an adaptive response. Under threat, speed and simplicity matter more than creativity or precision.
The problem is that this mode is terrible for solving anything that requires restructuring the problem itself. In my case, anxiety locked my thinking into a single narrative: something broke, I need help, it will be expensive. The idea of a trivial electrical protection component could not compete with that attractor.
During sleep, that dominance weakens. Memory reactivation becomes broader. Associations that could not win during waking stress are allowed to surface. The system is not smarter at night. It is simply less constrained by fear-driven priorities. Sleep loosens the landscape. The brain can try other paths.
I see the same mechanism very clearly in a completely different setting. Once or twice a week I play the game Mafia. I watch smart and articulate people build careful logical arguments when they play for the villagers. They track contradictions, compare stories, and explain their reasoning with impressive clarity. I do the same.
But when those same people, including myself, are assigned the role of mafia, something changes. Especially if suspicion already falls on them. Stress rises immediately. Their reasoning becomes narrower. They panic. They over-explain. They contradict themselves. They start saying things that would be obvious mistakes if they were calm.
It is not that their intelligence disappears. The search space collapses. They stop exploring possibilities and start defending a shrinking position. Fear pushes thinking into survival mode. The difference is visible within minutes.
Thinking is not the execution of logic. It is a search through internal models. Stress does not distort logic. It collapses the search space.
This is why high anxiety reliably produces rigid opinions, repetitive narratives, black-and-white interpretations and emotional certainty. Not because stressed people become morally worse, but because their cognitive system is operating under a different regime.
Once you understand this, a much larger pattern becomes visible.
A population exposed to sustained fear, threat and uncertainty will not suddenly become irrational. It will become cognitively constrained. The same narrowing that prevents an individual from discovering a simple solution prevents societies from tolerating ambiguity, comparing competing explanations and sustaining long chains of reasoning.
This is not a conspiracy. It is a usable property.
The fact that fear narrows thinking does not require secret plans. It only requires incentives. There are many contexts in which it is useful that large numbers of people remain emotionally activated, cognitively busy with alarm, and rarely enter reflective states. Political actors, media ecosystems and ideological movements all benefit when attention remains short-horizon, emotionally charged and constantly reset by new threats.
This is why news coverage almost everywhere converges toward the same emotional profile. Not explanation. Urgency. Conflict. Danger. Outrage. The tone is not accidental. It is what reliably captures attention and keeps it.
This is exactly what Erich Fromm described long ago. His central insight was not about propaganda techniques. It was about psychological vulnerability. Anxious and insecure individuals become more willing to trade complexity and autonomy for emotional relief. Not because they are manipulated by clever messages, but because sustained anxiety changes what kind of thinking becomes tolerable.
I see this very clearly in my own family environment. People from the older generation, shaped by decades of uncertainty and threat, often consume enormous amounts of negative news. They search for bad events and then slip them into ordinary conversation, almost compulsively. The world is always getting worse. Something is always about to collapse. Someone is always to blame.
I understand why this happens. It is not stupidity. It is a nervous system trained for danger for most of a lifetime. But being around that constant narrative is poisonous. It injects threat signals into your mental environment again and again. And because it comes from people close to you, it bypasses most internal filters. There is nothing you can really fix there. The only realistic strategy is minimizing exposure.
The loop is self-reinforcing. Stress narrows thinking. Narrow thinking makes threat-based narratives more attractive. Those narratives increase stress. Once such a loop stabilizes, nobody has to actively maintain it. It becomes an ecosystem.
Media compete for attention. Attention is easiest to capture with emotional activation. Emotional activation keeps people returning. This is not moral corruption. It is structural convergence.
After long sequences of disasters, wars, scandals and crisis warnings, television news often ends with something oddly gentle. A panda in a local zoo learned how to balance on a beam. The panda slipped. The panda recovered. Everyone smiles.
I noticed this very clearly while living in the United States (was watching a lot of TV practicing my English).
The emotional structure is almost theatrical. Threat, threat, threat, threat, and then a small pocket of relief.
The panda is not there to inform you. The panda is there to regulate you. Just enough emotional release to keep you inside the loop. Not calm enough to disengage. Not disturbed enough to turn away.
Keeping people emotionally activated is profitable. Keeping people cognitively narrow is functional. Keeping people continuously concerned but rarely reflective is extremely stable.
No paranoia is required. Only an understanding of how stress reshapes thinking.
Once you notice that your own ability to solve a trivial technical problem depended not on intelligence, but on the emotional conditions under which your mind was allowed to search, it becomes difficult not to see the same architecture operating at much larger scales.
Sometimes the most revealing experiments happen not in laboratories, but inside a small plastic fuse box in a car.