The Science of Awe and the Mars Perseverance Rover

A version of this article appeared in this week’s It’s Not Just You newsletter. SUBSCRIBE HERE to have an essay delivered to your inbox every Sunday. Perseverance and Why Feeling Awe Increases Empathy Here’s a secret: I am a recovering cynic with recurring pessimistic tendencies. It’s hereditary. On a sunny day, my Irish grandfather would look out the window and say: “We’ll pay for this.” And I won’t even get into the generations of head-spinning drama on the Russian side. Lately, for all the obvious reasons, it’s been way too easy to fall into compulsive fretting. But last Thursday, I turned on the news expecting the usual terribleness, and there was the new Mars Rover, a car-sized cosmic miracle of engineering and optimism. And just seeing it, I felt a shocking little flutter of awe and untrammeled joy. Researchers who study awe (and yes, they do, more on that below) describe it as an emotion that arises when “one encounters something so strikingly vast that it provokes a need to update one’s mental schemas.” And my mental schemas definitely need updating. I could barely process this display of national functionality. The more I learned, the more awe I felt. I mean, hold on, while we were going about our lives over the last ten years, a legion of brilliant NASA scientists created an unbelievably sophisticated research vehicle, basically, a robotic geologist and astrobiologist designed to search for ...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Evergreen It's Not Just You Source Type: news