Sensory Overload as a Major Factor in the Overview Effect
It’s clear from an abundance of astronaut accounts that one of, and perhaps the single most significant, aspect of the first encounter with space and the view of the Earth is the sheer overload of new sensory experiences. Numerous astronauts have described this sense of sensory overload in graphic ways. Commercial space traveler to the ISS, Richard Garriott, who grew up in the Houston space community as the son of Shuttle pilot Owen Garriott (and therefore knew more about the experience of the astronauts than many other commercial travelers) nonetheless described it as “drinking from a fire-hose of new information”. NASA astronaut Thomas Jones said, “I struggled constantly to make sense of an avalanche of new sensations and perceptions”. “‘It is a pity that my eyes have seen more than my brain has been able to assimilate,’ exclaimed Michael Collins.
Thomas Kuhn, in his landmark book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions coined the term paradigm shift to describe how “normal” science gradually accumulates an abundance of experimental data that does not fit into the existing model of a particular field. Eventually this cognitive overload, can no longer be dismissed or accommodated by the existing mind-set of the relevant field and forces a sudden “paradigm shift” to an entirely new model, which may bear little relationship to the previous model. He examined the Copernican Revolution, Newtonian Physics, Relativity and Quantum Physics among others. This model of how a super-abundance of radically new sensory (experimentally validated) information forces the sudden shift to a new mental framework and perception of the world is a rather accurate metaphor for the kind of shifts and changes experienced by many astronauts.
