Neuroscience has confirmed what most of us already know — humans are terrible at understanding big numbers. This limitation likely contributed to challenges in how the American public perceived and grappled with COVID. Two neuroscientists explained it this way, “Numbers are a useful, clear and efficient way to summarize [harms], but … the brain simply can’t understand what it means that a million people have died.”
In a similar way, most people struggle to process this even bigger number: 28 million people are trapped in human trafficking situations globally, including 3.3 million children. To make better sense of this number, I’ll convert it into units that are more familiar — 28 million people would fill Chicago’s Wrigley Field 672 times. Twenty-eight million also represents the population of DC, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware and North Carolina, combined.
