Overview Effect
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A cognitive shift is an adjustment to one’s mental processes, generally triggered by an external force.
Taking a psychoactive substance, for instance, like peyote or LSD, can shift your perception, causing you to see the world from a different angle, in a different way, with your senses rearranged and/or a distorted understanding of what you’re sensing. The direct effects of such substances are temporary, but many people report long-term changes in the way they see things, the way they think, and the way they understand the world, themselves, and reality.
These longer-term changes in perception are cognitive shifts. By becoming aware of a new position from which to view things, then looking at even familiar things and concepts from that new perspective, our fundamental conception of everything can be jolted out of place.
It’s as if you’ve lived in the same small town your entire life, have never traveled beyond the bounds of the few square miles that make up its geography, and have never met a person who wasn’t part of the few thousand people who live there.
Then you visit New York City, or Taipei, or Moscow.
It’s unlikely that our understanding of things wouldn’t change at least a little after being exposed to such a different place, so many new people, such a dramatic shift in our way of being, habits, social reflexes, and perception of legitimate goals.
Our brains may recalibrate after we learn that some of what we thought was true is not, some of what we thought was false is true, and the borders of our experience, where we assumed the world, reality, all the important things, ended, actually extend far further than we ever imagined.
Perhaps the most well-known example of a cognitive shift is what’s called the “overview effect,” which was coined in a book of the same name that was written in 1987 about the cognitive shift experienced by a large number of astronauts the first time they went up into space and looked out the window at Earth.
A quote from Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins on the matter:
“The thing that really surprised me was that it [Earth] projected an air of fragility. And why, I don’t know. I don’t know to this day. I had a feeling it’s tiny, it’s shiny, it’s beautiful, it’s home, and it’s fragile.”
Variations of this statement have been shared by a great many astronauts, and there’s some evidence that the same effect might be triggered in non-astronauts through the use of virtual reality and other sensory technologies.
For some people, a version of the overview effect emerges after merely viewing a photograph of objects in space, like the famous Pale Blue Dot photo, taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft in 1990. This photo shows Earth, taken from a distance of 6 billion kilometers, which is about 3.7 billions miles or 40.5 astronomical units, away.
That distance reduces Earth down to the size of a tiny little pixel, a minuscule blue-white speck within a much larger photo.
It’s uncomfortable, I think, to realize that everything we’ve ever done as a species, all of human and planetary history, and everything we personally care about, from our families and friends to the daily dramas and professional ambitions that shape most of our priorities and concerns, all exist within that little dot.
A dot that, in the grander context of space, and even just this snapshot of one small region of space, is nothing; it’s actually easy to miss within that larger context, if you don’t know what you’re looking for.
The overview effect is sometimes called the “God’s eye view effect,” and with good reason. Looking through this lens, we access a wider reality, and may realize just how small and relatively meaningless much of our thinking, our actions, and our cares and ambitions, truly are.
Through this lens, then, we’re diminished—which is uncomfortable. But we also diminish all the things we’re worried about, the things we struggle so hard to ignore, kill, or quash. The small town in which we’ve always lived suddenly seems quite small in the larger context of this wider perspective to which we’ve been granted access.
This effect, this wider view, can be triggered through other, non-space means, as well.
Having kids, for instance, tends to make people more aware of and concerned about what happens in the future, beyond the limits of their own lifespan. One’s legacy and long-term impact may become more pressing after having kids, because one is suddenly concerned with not just their own, temporal well-being, but that of their offspring, and the world in which they’ll live, as well.
Near-death experiences can also have this effect, putting our daily worries and concerns into the context of life and death, diminishing other issues through comparison, and perhaps changing our priorities, behaviors, and thinking patterns, as a consequence.
Learning new things, like how computers work or how biological systems fit together into ecosystems can shift our perspective in fairly dramatic ways, giving us a glimpse of what’s happening around us, but which we generally fail to perceive.
Global happenings, from terrorist attacks to pandemics, can likewise cause us to take stock, assess the larger context, and make changes to the way we do things: including the way we perceive, process, and behave based on what’s happening in the world.
Cognitive shifts of any kind can be uncomfortable, even painful, because the implication of becoming more aware of the larger context is that, up until that moment of increased perspective, you’ve been living in a small town, thinking that’s all there is. And that can be embarrassing, but it also maybe means that much of what you’ve worked so hard to accomplish may no longer be relevant, based on what you now know.
Some people pull back at such moments, retreating to the familiar, the smaller, the more manageable and containable context that better fits how they’ve always thought and behaved.
Others, though, begin the arduous process of recontextualization, figuring out which of their beliefs, concerns, and behaviors still make sense, which need to be changed or replaced, and what seems prudent to believe, care about, and do, knowing what they now know; having seen the bigger picture.
Like an LSD-triggered experience or a visit to space, not all cognitive shifts of this kind are permanent. What happens after we perceive the broader context is important, and it’s possible to luxuriate in a sense of knowledge and understanding, only to fall back into old routines and reflexes, allowing a comfortable veil of familiarity to descend and eventually conceal the shocking new perspective we momentarily glimpsed.
Breakthrough thinking isn’t a guaranteed path to a wider world or a more expansive personal philosophy. Going to space won’t make us more thoughtful or intentional, and tripping on something psychoactive may provide us with an interesting story and weird dreams for a while, but nothing more than that.
The degree to which we can be humble about our everlasting state of perceptual finitude, then, is perhaps a more reliable indicator of whether and how long the effects of such shifts will stick however we came by them in the first place.
Enjoying Brain Lenses? You might also enjoy my news analysis podcast, Let’s Know Things.
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