You might remember Dan Gilbert as the author of Stumbling on Happiness or as the presenter of one of the best-ever TED Talks back in 2004 (posted online in 2006).

I’ve just found a 15 minute talk he gave at Pop!Tech in 2007 on global climate change and why our brains don’t seem to care much about it.

It takes you just milliseconds to duck when somebody throws a baseball at your head because your brain is an exquisitely engineered “get out of the way” machine, and it’s constantly scanning the environment for things out of whose way it should right now get.

Quite apart from the interesting content, that particular sentence was wonderfully phrased.