There’s an upside to seeking out awe-inspiring scenarios in our daily lives
Q. He was totally unprepared for its “raw, omnipresent beauty.” It was “stupefying,” something that “stops your thought.” What was IT, and is there a name for this overpowering feeling?
A. The words were those of NASA astronaut Chris Hadfield when he stepped out of the International Space Station for his first spacewalk and gazed upon his home planet, says Jo Marchant in “New Scientist” magazine. The feeling he experienced is awe, first defined in 2003 by pioneering awe researcher Dacher Keltner and Jonathon Haidt as “the feeling we get when confronted by something vast that transcends our frame of reference and that we struggle to understand.”
Gazing up at a giant Redwood tree, standing in front of a Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton, watching an awe-inspiring nature video — all might elicit the emotion that combines “amazement with an edge of fear.” Feeling awestruck, Marchant says, “can dissolve our very sense of self, bringing a host of benefits from lowering stress and boosting creativity to making us nicer people,” more generous and more connected to others.
Put aside the myth that awe is rare, Keltner advises. Now think about what you find awe-inspiring and try to make it part of your everyday experience, whether choosing the route to walk home, the book to read, or the movie to watch. “Don’t think it takes big bang conversions to get five minutes of awe . ... Find your sources and go get it.” Q. Some plants like the wild tobacco plant have shown remarkable resilience when under attack. Explain, please. A. Sensing the amino acids in a caterpillar’s saliva, this meter-high native of North America responds with an alarm signal through its stems and leaves that within minutes increases its production of nicotine — a poison that interferes with an animal’s muscle function, says Elizabeth Pennisi in “Science” magazine. “When attacked, a single wild tobacco leaf can pack in a half a cigarette carton’s worth of nicotine.”
For hawkmouth caterpillars that have evolved protective measures, the plant produces compounds that inhibit digestion and abrasives that wear down the attacker’s mouthparts. Further, the plant emits a scent to attract caterpillar eaters, then puts up chemical signposts to lead them to their already sluggish prey.
Concludes Pennisi: “Amazingly, all of this is orchestrated not by a centralized brain, but by decision-making cells scattered throughout the plant.” Q. Talk of “fake news” is all a-twitter these days. What facts can researchers add to the discussion? A. Drawing on more than 4.5 million tweets and retweets posted on Twitter from 2006-2017, media scientist Deb Roy of MIT and colleagues investigated about 126,000 tweet cascades — families of tweets composed of one original tweet and all its retweets, reports Maria Temming in “Science News” magazine. They then winnowed that number down to some 2,400 news stories that had been independently verified or debunked. Their findings? “Discussions of false stories tended to start from fewer original tweets, but some of those retweet chains then reached tens of thousands of users, while true news stories never spread to more than about 1,600 people” and took six times longer. “Overall, fake news was about 70 per cent more likely to be retweeted than real news.” When bots (automated Twitter accounts) were later examined, it turned out that they spread false and true news about equally.
Fact checks: False news stories spread more quickly than real news. And in the realm of Twitter rumormongering, humans are the leading players.