This is true, and this also makes me wonder if my brain is just wired up differently. I respond very, very strongly (and adversely, obviously) to news and video images of war, even when it's happening far away from me. I'd guess it's *not* because I'm more compassionate,
but because I've spent a lot of time in places that are "half way 'round the world," so they've acquired a vivid reality to me, as has the smallness of the world. But I can absolutely understand why these places could seem far away as Mars--
if you hadn't had the experience of getting on a plane and being in a "far away place" 12 hours later. The human mind naturally works at the scale of the village, not the globe.
