Perception and The Overview Effect
It is widely assumed that traveling into space is a unique and remarkable experience. The fact that it has a lasting impact on astronauts is easy for most people to accept. The actual nature of the experience, however, is less well understood. The result is that the space experience is widely misunderstood by the general public and even many of the leaders and advocates of the New Space industry and larger space community. The rapid rise and sophistication of cognitive science provides us with a wealth of research and models for gaining a greater understanding of this experience, which is soon to affect our entire civilization.
Since the publication of Frank White’s The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution, the term “overview effect” has become the most frequently used term to refer to these experiences in the space community and industry. However neither the book nor the term is widely known to the general public. And even in the space community, few have read or studied the astronaut interviews and quotes very well.
The result is that even when the term is used, it is often misinterpreted as referring to a few of the more “exotic” of the experiences that have been widely rumored. Hence, many refer to the overview effect as a spiritual or metaphysical epiphany, often expressed as a sense of oneness with all mankind or with the universe itself. While there are several dramatic astronaut accounts of this nature, it is clear that the vast majority of astronauts do not, and likely would not, describe their experiences with these terms.
A second and perhaps more widely held misinterpretation is that of “space euphoria”. This term was apparently first coined by NASA psychologists who became aware that fascination with the view of the Earth and the stars induced an emotional impact among many astronauts. These psychologists were concerned that such fascination could hinder the astronauts’ ability to stay focused on their mission and actively tried to help them avoid it.
They likened it to “Rapture of the Deep” which some deep sea divers experience and the “Breakaway Effect”, which affects some pilots in extended high-altitude flights. The widely consulted on-line database, Wikipedia, merges these two in its definition of the Overview Effect in calling it a “transcendental euphoric feeling of universal connection”.
It is clear from numerous astronaut interviews that only a small minority of astronauts would describe their experiences in this way. And while some degree of “euphoria” alone would probably be an aspect of space flight acceptable to a majority of astronauts -- one said that “if you’re not euphoric, you’re not paying attention” --, euphoria alone does not account for the fact that a majority report that many of the effects of their space experiences were life-long.
It is clear that White meant to document the nature of the space experience in its widest sense rather than these specific minority aspects. Thus, the widespread understanding of it in these more limited terms obscures the actual nature of the experience. This is particularly significant at a time when commercial space travel is about to begin and will expose large numbers of private citizens to the experience.
And, in addition to these more limited and exotic interpretations limiting a truer awareness, it has become clear to those of us who study the overview effect, that the very “exotic” nature of these descriptions have inhibited leaders of the New Space Industry and larger space community from using the term overview effect more publicly. This is a field that has struggled since its inception with what is widely called the “Giggle Factor” when attempting to describe efforts to establish a “Space-Faring Civilization”. This inhibition is doubly in force when attempting to get government funding, support or regulations in favor their emerging industry.
Cognitive Science and the Overview Effect of Space Travel
Fortunately, the field of Cognitive Science, which has rapidly grown over the last two decades, provides a wealth of research and theory that helps to explain the overview effect and the difficulty in communicating it in rigorous scientific language.
Curiously, there is little cognitive research by NASA or the NewSpace industry that shed further light on the space experience. While the body of current perceptual research gives considerable support for a cognitive understanding of the overview effect, there are no prominent existing cognitive studies focusing on it in either field. One reason for this lack of research and analysis, in addition to the “exotic inhibition, stems from the difficulty of communicating the actual experience, as expressed by numerous astronauts.
Modern cognitive research explains that the very mechanisms of human perception that give rise to the overview effect create ‘cognitive barriers’ to our perceiving it here on Earth.
This modern model of perception ascribes a powerful role to previous sensory experience and built-in brain “pre-sets” in the mind’s creation of the images of perception out of a sort of statistical sampling of previous experiences.
Research such as that of Dale Purves, Director of the Duke University Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, demonstrates that raw sensory data, even the patterns on our retina, are inherently ambiguous without the organizing effect of previous evolutionary and individual experience. Additional support comes from the few cases of people born blind and gaining their sight late in life. They must learn how to see, as counterintuitive as that may seem to us who have possessed sight throughout or lives. The effort to learn to see is difficult, emotionally threatening and seldom completely successful. Leading cognitive scientists now conclude that sight is a learned ability to interpret largely ambiguous sensory data and ‘construct’ perceptual images rather than a mechanism that simply receives them whole from the external world.
Media Theory and the “Cognitive Barriers” to Space
Based on modern media theory, itself influenced by this new cognitive research, the brain’s previous experience is even more necessary to the perception of media images. Even high-resolution photos and video require not only previous perceptual experience with similar real things to organize inherently ambiguous light pixels, but experience with images themselves in order to learn to interpret patterns on a surface as 3-dimensional objects and spaces. Animals, small infants and cultures without well-developed representational art cannot see the world in photos. Many of the “late-sighted” never learned ‘the trick’.
While most of us have learned it, the limitations still apply. Much of what we see in pictures and video of space is supplied by our previous experience. When that previous experience is only with other space images, the new information is far less than we imagine, and the sense of reality in the brain is small despite what we may customarily think. The reality of such images is analogues to that of computer desktop icons of printers and trash cans or smiley-faces that only suggest what they represent but which we learn to ‘see’. In the worst case, it becomes a stereotype, clearly emphasizing qualities that are nonexistent or peripheral. Other examples include a doctor’s ability to interpret X-rays or a radar operator’s perception of images on a scope, both of which may be meaningless to the layman.
Thus, the vast majority of the public, including world leaders and reporters of space stories, have only the narrowest sense of the reality of space or the Earth’s true nature as a planet within it. The overview effect, then, is less of an effect of space itself than the replacement of the false internal image of the Earth and space that we have absorbed from the limitations of perception, and from space media and media creators, who themselves have not had experience with the real thing.
Space Media/Awareness in the first Space Age
How then did we gain the public space awareness and motivation of the first Space Age?
Part of it was the fact that the images and reports were new, providing us with a richness of information we didn’t previously have. As Robert Poole so clearly documents in his book Earthrise, the first photos of the Earth from space changed our world significantly. They have been universally praised for jump-starting the environmental movement and the rise of ‘systems thinking’ in many fields. Other authors have implicated these powerful images in aiding the Peace Movement’s role in ending of the Vietnam War and, along with global satellite communications, in the fall of the Iron Curtain and other significant global perceptual shifts.
An additional effect flowed from the huge involvement of the government and its impact on the economy, education, media and public awareness. Those who lived through that unique era were surrounded with space images and concepts from countless space reports, products that were sold (truthfully or not) as ‘space age technology’, and the increasing infusion of space into popular media, culminating perhaps in Star Trek and 2001: A Space Odyssey. These two are icons among many space enthusiasts, and are cited by many astronauts as their career inspirations. And they were the inspiration for many of the space science fiction staples of today.
Which raises a question: With so much existing Earth and space imagery and space science fiction available and the beginning point established years ago, why do we suffer from the cognitive barriers today? To find the answer we need to examine the cultural and media differences between the First Space Age and the New Space Age.
The First Space Age inundated us with space imagery and ideas, both real and imagined, along with the added reality of a massive government program. Cars had tail fins, emulating rockets! The astronauts were highly visible national heroes, whose exploits were avidly followed on national television. Many children dreamed of following them into space. We were living in The Space Age. And from the far future exploits of Captain Kirk and company to the starkly real visions of the near future 2001’, we just knew we were destined to soon go there ourselves. The spaceliner that carried citizens to the gleaming giant space station in 2001’ was Pan Am. The hotel in the station was a Hilton. It was our present world projected just a few decades out, to the early 21st Century, toward which we were rapidly rushing.
And then Apollo ended, the space program cut back, the Shuttle program and the International Space Station became long and drawn out affairs with radically reduced expectations. The Shuttle accidents further delayed and reduced the dream. Science fiction turned from outer space to cyber-space, and young people dreamed not of being astronauts but of creating new computer ‘apps’ that sold to Microsoft and Google, and later of mega-hit websites and content.
The media-sphere grew world-wide (in part due to communication satellites) and splintered into a myriad of ever morphing channels and forms. The competition for ‘eyeballs’, and the difficulty of cutting through the media-clutter, provided scant room for the reduced, elitist space program.
And though by the mid-90s the first of the entrepreneurial space efforts were already beginning, despite the fact that NASA had apparently clearly demonstrated that space travel was only for massively funded national efforts, was dangerous and only for professional astronauts. Besides, apart from the historic race with the Soviet Union, space travel was seemingly about cosmological and geologic science and exploration, hardly issues that directly relate to our current world challenges.
Our “Post” Space Age
All of these influences have served to remove space, space travel and the space experience from our current media influenced mass culture. And there are fewer who vividly remember the amazing potential future in space that then seemed just a few decades away.
In addition, our media-sphere has grown exponentially larger, inundating us with an overwhelming array of information, entertainment and sheer data, within which it is increasingly difficult to gain widespread awareness for something radically new and counterintuitive, such as the fact that commercial space travel is about to begin.
Many people, when informed of the facts of this emerging opportunity, often ask, “Why haven’t there been any media stories on it?” Yet stories about the building and flight testing of commercial Space Tourism ships, privately launched orbital rockets, the building of private orbital space stations and NASA’s increasing reliance on these New Space companies to maintain their access to the International Space Station in the Post-Shuttle Era have been widely covered in major media outlets.
However, as I have outlined, perception is heavily shaped by previous sensory experience and for a large part of our current active population there are no personal memories of a time when space travel was expected to soon become a part of our daily lives. And for many who did live during those exciting days, the memories have been submerged beneath a welter of other media images, world and personal problems and issues. The vivid sensory memories that would give reality to these incredible new space technologies and re-ignite the “Dream of Space Travel” are no longer part of our culture. As a result these stories have little “sense of reality” and as I like to say, “Go in one eye, and out the other”. If they are remembered at all, it is as either Science Fiction or a distant future possibility.
This is how the very nature of human perception, now being explored and communicated by the rapidly growing field of Cognitive Science can help us to understand both the nature of the Overview Effect and why it is so difficult to communicate, especially through the limits of conventional media.
Perhaps more importantly though, Cognitive Science can also help us to understand how to use more sophisticated cognitive and media techniques and technologies to overcome these barriers. It also can help us to understand how important that understanding the Overview Effect is to reigniting the “Dream of Space Travel” at a time when that “Dream” may finally be within our reach.