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Nine years ago, there was a bogeyman named Y2K. Remember him? Remember the endless stream of pundits telling us society was coming to a gruesome end? Planes falling from the sky; melted power grids; tumbleweeds rolling down the aisles of the local Safeway. We'd all be lucky if any of us made it alive past January, and even then only if we had a power generator, a silo filled with gasoline, 2,000 cans of tuna and some good weather.

And then came Jan. 1, 2000, and the only drama that transpired, I believe, was that a chain of drugstores in Cape Town, South Africa, had its hard drives erased - and somewhere deep inside Switzerland, a few trains were late - and that was it.

I mention this now because it seems to me we're inside another Y2K-like hysteria scenario, except our current doomfest doesn't have a Jan. 1 expiry date - it's open-ended. Perhaps Jan. 20? Maybe the third quarter of 2009? Early 2010? Or perhaps the worst date of all: unknown.

I thought about expiry dates, and so I spoke with friends a few decades older than me and I asked them what it felt like to have a mortgage in the 1970s and early 1980s, and they said it obviously it didn't feel too good. And then I asked them how scary it felt in general to weather the early 1970s financial woes and all of the subsequent cyclical downswings since then.

The unanimous agreement seems to be that, while previous downswings were no cakewalk, what's happening at the end of 2008 is weirder, darker and spookier than anything that's come before. It obsesses them and eats up a huge slice of their everyday imaginative lives in a way previous recessions never did.

Obviously, the financial mechanics of gloomageddon 2008 are different from previous downswings, and this one may quite easily end up being far bigger than them all. But what's extraordinarily different with this downswing is society's collective neural response to it. The 2000 tech bubble burst was pretty darn bad, but people weren't eaten up by it the way they are by this current mess. What seems to be different is the way we look at the present and the way we look at the near future and the way we do (and don't) handle risk.

Marshall McLuhan tells us that "terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it, everything affects everything all the time." What he perhaps didn't foresee was that terror didn't turn out to be Winston Smith's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Terror turned out to be a friend's grandmother bingeing on conspiracy websites during a late-night browsing jag, triggering days of pension freak-out e-mails with her daughter, Sarah, down in Human Resources, who then installs a real-time Dow Jones ticker widget in the top right-hand corner of her work screen, and when Sarah goes home, she and her husband browse online real-estate listings wondering when the bottom's going to hit. Nothing has really changed, but everybody's adrenalized, miserable and chomping at the bit for data - more data, please - all we want is more data. What's going on here?

As old economic models seem increasingly irrelevant, a new field, neuroeconomics, is evolving: Scientists study human responses to risk and the near future on a small scale, then apply gleaned lessons to society as a whole. The evolving thinking is that electronics extend our central nervous systems, and that economic news in particular has hit the point of speed and saturation that our microeconomic daily freak-outs are becoming the new macroeconomics.

The advantages of time, geography, education, connections, gender and wealth have largely levelled the information playing field with democratic vim. Your grandmother gets her Nasdaq data at the same speed as David Geffen, but she's probably not as agile as him at interpreting it in a rational way. And when she or Mr. Geffen or anyone else go to interpret their financial information, their brain's amygdala moves into action, as do parts of their orbitofrontal cortex that regulate the amygdala.

I don't wish to play down the science behind neuroeconomics. Basically, when the brain needs to make a decision on a situation that may well go sideways, the brain tends not to use statistics or logic to rationally guide its way. Instead, it says: "An information vacuum? I hate vacuums. I know - I'll fill in that vacuum with fear." The fear switch is pulled, and welcome to 2008. We have a billion amygdalas out there feeding on each other, exacerbating their worst tendencies and creating fear where it's neither merited nor of any help.

So, as human nature doesn't seem likely to change in the foreseeable future, the only thing we can do is command our rational selves to stop our irrational selves from clicking the Reuters or Huffington or Drudge bookmark every 10 minutes. As we know, bad news travels instantly; good news ends up on a slag heap. Remember: Capitalism is a robust system. Things really will get better. This will pass. Go out and buy a Chrysler.

Or maybe not.

Vancouver-based novelist Douglas Coupland is finishing a biography of Marshall McLuhan.